


all the anxious futures

by amazonqueen



Series: these foolish feelings [3]
Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Actors, Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, Alternate Universe - Photographer, Angst, Cigarettes, Female Hong Jisoo | Joshua, Genderbending, Homophobia, Idiots in Love, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Photographer Choi Seungcheol | S.Coups, Smoking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 04:24:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17594573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amazonqueen/pseuds/amazonqueen
Summary: a collection of possible endings to Jeonghan and Seungcheol's love story.chapter 1: the one where they live happily ever after.“I’m just saying what I see,” Jisoo said, putting two hands up in a show of faux surrender. “And what I see is forbidden love and desperate desire.”“You should start writing romance novels. The trashy, Dollar Store kind.”





	all the anxious futures

**Author's Note:**

> alternate title: once more with honesty. 
> 
> for chris! happy birthday, and thanks for giving me the motivation to finish this.

Yoon Jeonghan rested his head against the cool glass of the car window, droplets of rain sliding down the outside, tears separated from his face by a thick pane of glass.

He was waiting in Jisoo’s apartment’s parking lot to pick her up, the leftover rain from his drive over still sliding down his car window. It would all be gone, eventually. Rain didn’t stay forever. He knew that now. Besides, it would clean his car for him, get rid of all the dust that came with this metropolis, the low air quality that stained his car’s shining exterior. Rain was gloomy and dark when it came, but when it left, it left mushrooms and clean cars and flowers in its wake, so it couldn’t be all bad.

Jeonghan rather liked mushrooms, actually. He used to subsist on them when he went out for Korean barbecue with the friends he used to have, the old people from his youth. Jeonghan wasn’t old, not really; a normal person wouldn’t consider thirty-two all that old. Still, Jeonghan couldn’t forget his past, his background. His stint as an international supermodel had left its marks on him, had reached into his brain and squeezed hard until the indents of its fingers would never leave. Jeonghan could never look at age the same way again, and being in a different part of the entertainment industry certainly didn’t help with that.

Jeonghan was used to it by now. His acting career had supposedly spanned seven years now, but Jeonghan knew that he had been acting for long before that. He was pretty good at it, too, or he wouldn’t have made it this far.

A sudden rap on his window. Jeonghan blinked hard, flinched away, and then his eyes focused on his friend of many years, Hong Jisoo. Jeonghan’s elegant finger pressed down hard on his car’s window control, and Jisoo’s smile seemed to get wider as it went down.

“Yah, Hong Jisoo,” Jeonghan said, tone and words irreverent. “What are you doing, knocking on people’s windows like they’re doors?”

“You weren’t paying attention to me,” she shrugged, a shining curtain of dark hair slipping over and behind her. “Now unlock the door.”

A grudging smile and a small huff of laughter left Jeonghan. “Ah, you know how to get what you want,” he sighed while unlocking the door for her. “Get inside.”

“Where are we going today?” Jisoo asked, careful and deliberate as she stepped in from the other side.

A shrug from Jeonghan as the car rolled out of the parking lot and into the city streets once again. “Anywhere.”

“Anywhere isn’t a place --” Jisoo began, but Jeonghan cut her off.

“It’s a state of mind!”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Jisoo said, deadpan.

“Well, forgive me for trying to be cheerful,” Jeonghan replied, rolling his eyes like a teenager straight out of an early-aughts high school drama. If he had hair long enough for it, he’d flip it. Jeonghan settled for flicking his bangs out of his eyes.

“I’ll do my best,” Jisoo sighed, pretending to be downcast and stern, but a smile peeked out anyway.

“How do you get more cheerful as time goes on?” Jeonghan asked, voice genuinely curious, tilting his head as he watched Jisoo.

“You get used to the world.”

“I wish I have.”

Jisoo’s mouth quirked up. “You do well, Jeonghan,” she assured him. “You did a really good job,” she then sang, voice lilting and sweet. It was a pretty song by Lee Hi, one that Jeonghan rather enjoyed and listened to in the quiet moments of the night, when he was tucked up in his apartment and there was a storm outside, or he was cocooned in the bubble of sound that came when your apartment was so high up that the sound of the city outside couldn’t quite reach you. When the wind blew the right way, sometimes he could hear occasional sounds of cars or people, but it was more soothing than grating when there was so much distance.

It was also not in _banmal_ , which he and Jisoo spoke with each other (seven years did that to you; who stood on formality after their beginnings, the things they’d been through with each other?).

“Hey, that sounds nice,” he said, voice already teasing, “how about you stick to the honorifics? I could get used to this politeness from you.”

“Seriously?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“No,” Jisoo replied, taking too much satisfaction in such a simple word. Jeonghan tried pouting for a mere moment before dropping it, the aegyo unfamiliar and uncomfortable. He was more than a little too old for that now.

“Stop laughing,” he grumbled. “I used to be good at that.”

“Yeah?” Jisoo asked, incredulous. “Who’d you stop using it on, then?”

The words dried up in Jeonghan’s throat. “Jisoo,” he said, the name soft and rounded, and her eyes went wide for a moment.

“Sorry,” she said after a few beats, and Jeonghan was reminded why he kept Jisoo around. She was the only one who had been around since his younger days as a supermodel, when he had been fucking one Choi Seungcheol and treating him terribly. She was the only one who had pushed back against his world-eating presence, the only one who had befriended him and stuck with him and taken none of his crap. But she wasn’t mean about it. Jisoo wasn’t mean about anything. The woman had a way about her of being absolutely angelic while holding her position and status and Jeonghan was just in awe of it most of the time.

“But don’t you think...” Jisoo trailed off of her own volition, eyes concerned and fixed on an increasingly white-knuckled Jeonghan.

“It’s been years,” she said softly, but Jisoo should know better than to expect anything from him. She was right. It had been years, which meant that Jisoo should stop expecting anything good out of Yoon Jeonghan.

He already had.

A dry laugh that rattled in his chest like illness. “Does that help?” Jeonghan said, making an effort at pretending to be a good driver, like he needed to focus all his attention on the road when this was Seoul and cars moved an inch an hour.

“It’s supposed to,” Jisoo said.

“Yeah, well, what would you know,” he replied, too much bitterness seeping into his voice, dark chocolate and black coffee mixed and gone rotten, something that could have been appreciated before merely too much and unwanted.

“Jeonghan,” Jisoo said, all meaning poured into one two-syllable name, and Jeonghan felt the harsh pang of someone else’s disappointment rattle inside his chest. He shouldn’t care anymore, really; his parents had always been disappointed in him, his younger sister a better child in every possible way (she had a steady job, she had a husband and a marriage and a child on the way, a normal life; Jeonghan was the child that had gone rogue and run off the pretty cobblestone path into the bushes of entertainment), Jihoon from university used to always be disappointed in him. Hell, he’d been disappointed in himself before.

But Jisoo had tossed one word, two syllables, hit the consonants with the right harshness and intonation (actress material right there), and Jeonghan felt like a child all over again, unable to do anything right.

“Jeonghan,” Jisoo said again, softer. “Don’t lash out at me to push me away. We’ve been here before.”

(Unspoken; _who else do you have that’s been here for so long, that won’t leave you when you pull this shit? I don’t take your bullshit normally and I won’t now and you love me for it._ )

“I’ve never done it to you before,” he admitted, turning the car smoothly into a parking space. He didn’t care where they were, he just needed to hide under cover of darkness in a parking lot where nobody cared or looked at them once, let alone twice, wanted to pretend he was nobody of importance in a world that wouldn’t let him forget it.

“So don’t start.”

Jeonghan dropped his head against the steering wheel, narrowly avoiding his horn going off.

Jisoo laughed a little. “God, you’re a mess.”

“I’m better than I was,” Jeonghan said, muffled. “That’s progress.”

Jisoo looked at him carefully for a few moments (he could feel the gaze, those sharp eyes boring into and through whatever substance was in his head where his brain should be), shining lips probably pursed, comfortable sweater swallowing her crossed arms.

“Better compared to what?” she asked, and Jeonghan had a feeling he wasn’t supposed to respond. Jisoo’s voice took on a different quality when she was about to give a speech. “To drinking as much as you want and smoking multiple packs a day and stalking your ex-something on the Internet?”

“Not stalking,” he said, head still buried. “Just keeping up with the news.”

When Jeonghan looked up, Jisoo was leaning away from him, back against the glass of the window and the undoubtedly awkward door handle, arms crossed, hair down, lip gloss fading a little.

“It’s all over, Jeonghan,” she said, tired and soft and faded.

“But it’s not,” he said, a bitter laugh tumbling out like smoke. “That’s the thing. I live it in my head every day. For him, it’s all over. For me, it never will be.”

Jeonghan lived on the rotational axes of planets, in the eyes of hurricanes; weeks and months and years and the world went on and passed, but Jeonghan stayed still, trapped in more than one cage of his own making.

“He thinks about you too,” Jisoo admitted, quiet, and Jeonghan remembered with a sudden start that Jisoo had been trapped between these two broken men for a long time; almost a decade, now. Seungcheol, who had fixed himself and moved on, at least from what Jeonghan could see, and Jeonghan, who never had. He wondered for a brief moment how Jisoo felt, watching one race, fleet-footed, further ahead, and one plod along.

(Not that his acting career had been plodding, but Jeonghan felt like a flat-footed donkey on a dirt road underneath the baking sun while Seungcheol cruised on by in comfort on a highway.)

“You don’t need to lie to me to make me feel better,” Jeonghan said, sighing.

“I would never,” Jisoo replied, eyes locked on his and sincere. “Not even to make you feel better.”

Another sigh from Jeonghan, a hand placed over hers, warm and platonic. “Sometimes, I think you’re the only that wouldn’t.”

* * *

Jeonghan was dribbling water into his mouth off the set during break when he felt his phone go off. Careful not to spill the water and ruin his costume (the stylists would probably actually murder him), Jeonghan twisted the cap back onto his battered metal water bottle and looked at his phone screen.

A picture of Jisoo wearing a flower crown peered back up at him, the kind of picture that fansites took of idols at fansigns. Neither he nor Jisoo was an idol but they all coexisted in the same industry, ran in the same circles, and that particular photo had been from Jisoo borrowing a flower crown that an idol friend had received from a fansite and having Jeonghan take fansite-esque photos of her, just for fun.

Neither of them aspired to have that kind of life though, just played at idol life when they were feeling a particular kind of ironic.

Jeonghan flipped the phone into his hand, narrowly avoiding an untimely drop to the ground, and brought it to his ear.

“Hey,” he said, voice lowered so as not to disturb his napping co-star.

“Hey Jeonghan,” Jisoo murmured back. “How are you doing?”

“That’s not why you’re calling,” Jeonghan replied, free hand fiddling with the zipper of the sweater that was part of his costume. It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d ever wear; more suburban dad than superstar actor, striped and innocuous. If Jeonghan ever wore sweaters they were pullovers, carefully curated so as to create the appearance of relaxation without sacrificing fashion. Jeonghan made calculations like that in his head every day. It was the only math he was good at.

“We’re both busy people, Jisoo,” Jeonghan continued before Jisoo could attempt to deny ulterior motives. “Don’t you have a variety show to film today?”

“Finished it already,” she replied lightly. “It’s like ten in the evening, Jeonghan.”

Jeonghan blinked a few times, a little perplexed (they had been in a studio all day, a facade of an apartment around them for indoor scenes), and then stepped over to the emergency exit that had been cracked open a little. The smell of cigarette smoke and something indescribably nighttime wafted to his nose, and he realized that Jisoo was right.

“...right. I knew that.”

“Mm,” Jisoo replied, clearly unconvinced.

“Get to the point,” Jeonghan sighed, casting a glance over his shoulder at the director, still busy conferring with the other staff members.

“So I was getting some drinks with a mutual friend of ours,” Jisoo said, and Jeonghan shrugged although she couldn’t see it.

“That means nothing to me,” he said, “we know so many people, Jisoo.”

“Let me finish.”

“Right,” Jeonghan said.

“So I was getting drinks with this friend of ours and it turns out he’s working on this project that I think you’d be really interested in.”

“A show?”

Jisoo was silent for a few moments. “Yeah,” she said. “A fashion show.”

“I’m retired, Jisoo,” Jeonghan said, sliding just a little bit of steel edge into his words the way that only an actor could.

“How hard is it to walk in a straight line and pose one more time?” Jisoo asked rhetorically. “Besides, it’s for a good cause. It’s raising money for AIDS research.”

“I’m not going to let one of your designer friends conscript me into his latest pet project so he can get people to actually come to his show.”

“Photographer, actually. He organized the thing, and he’s going to get a bunch of designers on board.”

“Photographer friend,” Jeonghan corrected. “Big difference.” His voice had begun to carry and he caught the eye of a passing staffer who was doing his best not to look like he was listening as he inched past Jeonghan to join the smokers lined up outside. Jeonghan took a measured breath and made a point of lowering the volume.

“And he doesn’t need you to make it a success. He’s pretty well-known in his own right, Jeonghan.”

“Oh yeah? Who?”

A long pause from the other end of the line, long enough that Jeonghan would have thought Jisoo had hung up or dropped her phone or something if it weren’t for the steady, slight noise of her breathing through the phone. Jeonghan waited, checked his nails, picked at a chip of paint on the wall. He could wait.

“Sounds like you don’t want to tell me.”

“You’re not going to like this,” Jisoo said cautiously.

“Spit it out.”

“It’s Seungcheol.”

“Goddamnit Jisoo, does he even know you’re doing this?” Jeonghan asked, frustrated.

He and Seungcheol had barely talked since they were twenty-five; nothing more substantial than pleasantries passed their lips when they were together. Jeonghan could probably count on one hand the different phrases they’d exchanged: hello; pretty cold outside huh; have you seen Jisoo; sorry; I’m busy; goodbye. He had worked with Seungcheol a few times before his departure from high fashion. Jeonghan was pretty sure the most substantial thing Seungcheol had ever said to him during those shoots were quick, short instructions, things like what angle he wanted Jeonghan’s head tilted at.

(Jeonghan had been too scared to try and talk to him properly, and Seungcheol had never been the one to initiate anything between the two of them, except that fateful day he ended it all.)

They were two ghosts, all that unfinished business hanging heavy in the air when they walked near each other. That was how they both liked it – or maybe it wasn’t, but that was how it was, and nobody could change it now. Jeonghan couldn’t say he liked the homeostasis, but it was the things were, and Jeonghan had always been best at playing with whatever cards he had been dealt. No point crying over spilled milk, as the expression went, and Jeonghan didn’t see the point in doing anything but shrugging and playing the game within its existing rules.

Jeonghan was grounded, and practical, and a little jaded. That was what happened when you grew up, and Jeonghan had grown the fuck up a long time ago.

(He wasn’t twenty-five anymore, and neither he nor Seungcheol could be naive again. Not that Jeonghan had been the naive one, but then again, hadn’t he, in a way? The only thing that could prompt a man to think he could get away with something that big for that long was naivete – or stupidity.)

“Uh,” Jisoo replied, as if she was thinking how to phrase it. “No.”

Jeonghan sighed. _Why is it my turn to be the mom,_ he thought to himself. “Why do you even bother,” was what he said instead. “It’s over. It’s dead. Don’t mess with the dead, Jisoo.”

“You make it sound like I’m pursuing necromancy when I’m just performing much needed CPR. I’m trying to save Jeongcheol.”

“That relationship is dead,” Jeonghan almost hissed. “It died in my apartment seven years ago. Your ship sank. Move on.”

“No!” Jisoo replied, and this time it was her turn to be too loud. “Look, if death can’t separate Jack and Rose, what can separate you two?”

“Life,” Jeonghan deadpanned. “Because this is reality, not a movie, and the story of Seungcheol and I is infinitely more complicated than Jack and Rose.”

He took a moment to collect himself. “You need to just give up,” he finally said, listening to the sound of his breath mingling with Jisoo’s, trickling through the phone in his hand to tickle the shell of his ear.

How many times had he and Jisoo done this? Held the newest smartphone to their ear on break at yet another variety show or photoshoot or movie set, chatted about something inane for a hot second before moving onto more substantial things, topics that always inevitably led to some point of disagreement? He had too much shared history with Jisoo to engage in something as trivial as small talk. How the weather was, when the next big superhero movie was going to come out; when you had spent seven years practically living in each other’s apartments, like he and Jisoo had, you moved past that.

And every time, it ended the same. Either he or Jisoo gave up and hung up, shelved the topic for the next time one of them was itching for a fight or, in Jisoo’s case, had suddenly gotten a case of altruism.

“You know I can’t do that,” Jisoo replied. “If I give up on you two, I give up on love.”

Jeonghan laughed, as bitter as the thermos of black coffee he’d drank that morning between takes. “What love?” he asked. “Our story is the last one you should be looking to as an example of true love. If anything, we’re a high school health class’ textbook example of an unhealthy relationship.”

“That textbook wouldn’t have two men in it and you know it,” Jisoo said, a little lighter than before. “And just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not true love. I believe you two can make it back together because love is imperfect but always improving. And if your love doesn’t improve to the point where you two get back together, I don’t know if I can believe in love anymore.”

For a long moment, Jeonghan had nothing to say. “When did your Korean get so good?” he finally croaked. “You’re out here giving mini philosophical treatises.”

“Seven years,” Jisoo reminded him. “That’s a long fucking time. Definitely long enough to get my Korean up to par.”

Jeonghan let out a long sigh. “Talking to you makes me want a cigarette,” he admitted. “I think that says something about you, that you make me want to drug myself.”

“Everything makes you want to smoke, Jeonghan,” Jisoo replied, not so easily hoodwinked. “You smoke when you’re stressed, and you work in a high-pressure environment. So it’s not anything about me, but rather something about your coping methods and how unhealthy they are.”

“Fuck,” Jeonghan said, more to himself than to Jisoo. Something about standing by the door, inhaling the smell of someone else’s cigarettes, combined with talking to Jisoo about an admittedly stressful topic, made him desperately crave a hit of nicotine, made his eyes wander towards his bag and his thoughts toward the pack of Marlboros at the bottom.

“I really,” he said, “really wanna smoke.”

“The smell will stick to your hair and I doubt your stylist will enjoy that,” Jisoo commented.

“The shoot’s almost over,” Jeonghan replied. “And I’m standing near a bunch of smokers, it’s a little late to worry about the smell.”

He didn’t wait for any permission. Within a few moments, Jeonghan had plucked a cigarette from his bag, lit it with his lighter, and walked down to the edge of the outside wall, as far away as he could be from the staff without looking suspicious.

“So?” Jisoo asked. “Are you going to do it or not?”

“What?” Jeonghan said, too caught up in the way the smoke curled towards the sky and disappeared to remember what Jisoo had been saying.

“The show. With Seungcheol.”

“No,” Jeonghan replied, on instinct. “I doubt he’d want me there anyway.”

“You know,” Jisoo said, voice resigned and exhausted, and Jeonghan suddenly remembered just how many years it had been, “I always tell you this, but you never believe it, and I always say it again anyway. He thinks about you too. All the time.”

“You can think about someone and not want them anywhere near you,” Jeonghan replied, softening his voice.

“Is that how you think about him, Jeonghan?” Jisoo asked.

He spent as many moments as he could pondering that question, cigarette in hand. The flame was burning closer and closer to his chilly fingers, like an hourglass slowly ticking towards the end of his time.

“No,” he admitted, and it came out more like a sigh than a Korean word, but Jisoo, bless her soul, understood what he’d said and didn’t make him repeat it.

“Then I don’t see the problem here.”

“Why would you need to hide that you’re asking if he’s okay with having me around?”

“Because you two are more alike than you think.”

Jeonghan inhaled on his cigarette, tipped his head away from Jisoo’s voice out of habit even though he knew she wasn’t actually standing out there next to him.

“And what is that supposed to mean?” he asked, eyes fixated on the flickering lights of a convenience store only across the street but somehow miles away.

“It means that you both think the other has no desire to see you.”

He and Seungcheol (he hadn’t thought of his ex-something as anything other than his proper name in a long, long time) had grown up together. They’d listened to bubblegum pop and angsty Big Bang songs in that dorm room all those years ago, had lived and laughed and loved and, eventually, left. Of course they thought alike. Of course they always figured the worst of each other and themselves.

Jeonghan let out a light laugh, and, in that moment, softened by nicotine and nostalgia (and maybe Jisoo’s words had been water crashing against rocks, eroding him to nothing after all these years), he said without thinking, “I’ll do it.”

“Wait, really?” Jisoo said, surprised. “That’s it? It only took seven years and a few minutes of conversation?”

“Don’t test me,” he teased.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” Jisoo said, the shock still lingering in her voice. “You’re not even going to talk to your manager?”

“I think we’re both at the point where our managers are just there to make our lives easier, not to decide where our careers go,” Jeonghan said, glancing down at his shoes. Jisoo had been right about his stylists not liking this. Smoking was a vice of his he’d never learned how to drop, right up there with drinking his life away and loneliness.

He often thought about sins, the nature of them, what was a sin and what wasn’t, what could be forgiven. Maybe it stemmed from the morality clauses he’d been subject to, all those years ago as a model and a rookie actor. No plastic surgery. No dating, for the longest time, although now that he’d been cemented in the industry he was pretty sure dating was more than acceptable at this point.

Smoking and drinking were both things he, realistically, should give up too. He had given up Seungcheol, seven years ago. Why couldn’t he get rid of the things that were actually terrible for his body?

(Because his cigarettes and soju didn’t have minds of their own. They couldn’t be hurt or hurt him, and in the end, it had been Seungcheol who broke them, not him.)

“Okay,” Jisoo said, voice brighter. “Okay!” she repeated. “Let’s do this. I’ll have someone send you the details.”

And just like that, before Jeonghan could even think about changing his mind or asking more questions, Jisoo hung up on him. He lowered his phone, shook his head ruefully, and put it back in his pocket.

The staff were all filing back inside, which meant that Jeonghan had a few minutes, tops, left before he had to film the last scene of the day.

Jeonghan inhaled sharply on his cigarette one last time, then dropped it to the ground and stamped the flickering embers out, along with any thoughts of Jisoo or Seungcheol or his life seven years ago.

He had a show to film.

* * *

Apparently, when Jisoo had said ‘someone’, she had meant Choi Seungcheol himself.

It was probably somewhere near midnight, about a week out from the phone call Jisoo had made to ask, so abruptly, whether he wanted to walk back into the life of a man who had walked away from him seven years before.

Looking back on it, now that he was calmer and comparatively well-rested and less nostalgic and firmly situated in his own body, not that of a character in a drama, Jeonghan wasn’t so sure it had been a good idea to give in.

After all, he wasn’t so old that his memory was going, and he had clear recollections of what it had been like to work with Seungcheol in those painfully fresh years their careers in fashion had overlapped.

He remembered having the distinct feeling of poking at an open wound every time he and Seungcheol locked eyes; he remembered having to look right at the photographer and channel charisma when all he had felt was hollowness and guilt. He remembered awkwardly, in moments of regret that usually appeared around five hours into the shoot and ten seconds before he got a break, trying to engage in conversation with Seungcheol and getting turned away.

Keeping that in mind, it was hard to imagine that that man would ever want to see or work with Jeonghan again.

Jeonghan was relaxing at home, alone, lying down on his couch while weighing the merits of breaking the diet he was on for his drama and mixing himself some kind of sugar-sweet cocktail, when his phone went off.

This was his ultra-secret phone number, the one that only his manager and his family and close friends had. So, idiot that he was, Jeonghan didn’t even bother to look at the caller ID before he picked up and brought the phone to his ear.

“Hello?” he mumbled, a chunk of his sweater having made it into his mouth somehow.

“Jeonghan?” the voice on the phone said, and Jeonghan nearly choked on his own spit.

He hadn’t talked to the other man in years (they’d made a point of avoiding each other after his departure from fashion, and they really had no excuse to even acknowledge the other’s existence anymore, since Jeonghan had left the industry), but, actor that he was, Jeonghan was cursed with a great memory for voices and mannerisms, and this was one voice he doubted he could ever forget.

He’d heard that voice in every possible variation before, once upon a time. Happy, upset, exhausted, drunk, in the throes of ecstasy and the depths of exam hell. How foolish it was of him, to think that those memories would obey his will and slide peacefully out of his brain and into whatever repository existed out there in space for useless things.

How absolutely, mind-bogglingly stupid he must be to think that his brain would release the grip it had on the box of recollections in his mind painstakingly labelled Choi Seungcheol.

“That’s me,” he said weakly. “What a surprise to hear from you, Seungcheol.”

For a brief moment, Jeonghan seriously considered appending a - _ssi_ to his ex’s name, if only to push the two of them further apart and let his lungs finally breathe in some air. Even though Seungcheol was nowhere near him, physically, just talking to him for a few seconds was enough to make his heart contract.

He heard a sigh through the phone. “Of course Jisoo didn’t tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“That I’d be calling. The kid thinks she’s such a mastermind.”

“I think she just gets it all from those rom-coms she watches.”

There was a fleeting moment where Jeonghan thought he heard an involuntary sound escape Seungcheol at the mention of rom-coms, and his own eyes flickered to a stack of out-of-date DVDs on the shelf near his TV.

He wished he could say he had forgotten and the mention of Jisoo’s rom-coms were an accident, but of course it wasn’t. Jisoo had been caught between the two of them for the last seven years. Seungcheol loved rom-coms; it was why Jeonghan had a casual collection of them. While Jeonghan had never shared them with Jisoo (they were too private for that), he knew for a fact that she had gotten into the same classics that Seungcheol had, and who else was there that would introduce her to them than Seungcheol?

Maybe he had wanted to poke at the scar one last time, see if it had truly healed over. Maybe Jeonghan wanted to show, somehow, that he still remembered. Maybe, and this was the most likely, Jeonghan was just a dumbass who couldn’t control his own mouth precisely in the moments he needed to most.

Whatever it was, at least he had gotten a reaction. Maybe Seungcheol remembered, too.

“Probably,” Seungcheol said, and Jeonghan knew he wasn’t imagining the change in energy.

“So,” Jeonghan said, “why are you calling?”

“Jisoo said you wanted to participate in the show.”

 _That’s one way to put it_.

“Oh, that’s right. She called me out of the blue last week to ask me about it while I was on set.”

Seungcheol took a moment to process this. “Well, I’m glad you want to be part of it. I know it’s been a while since you’ve done any sort of high fashion runway work and I really appreciate you wanting to contribute to the cause.”

Jeonghan let the silence between them languish for a few moments to word his response carefully. “We all do what we can,” he finally said. “And this is something I care about. So thank you for organizing it.”

“I’m going to meet up with some designers and other big-name models,” Seungcheol said, tone brisk and professional. “You’re basically the most famous person to commit, so it might be a good idea for you to come along with me when I meet them.”

“I’d be happy to help,” Jeonghan said. “Just tell me when and where and I’ll figure it out with my manager. I am in the middle of filming a drama, though. So I might not be able to go every time.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” and did Jeonghan detect a mix of relief and disappointment in Seungcheol’s voice? “We’re all busy people, I understand. How much longer will you be filming for?”

“A month or so,” Jeonghan responded right away. He loved his job, to a point, but nobody wanted to work all the time, and he was counting down the days until he could just stay at home and relax for a long while. Maybe go on a talk show or two, _Hello Counsellor_ or _Happy Together._ The easygoing stuff, not the survival shows.

“Perfect,” Seungcheol said. “I’ll be honest, I had basically just decided to really do this show when Jisoo told me you wanted in. So I’m still working on getting it off the ground.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help,” he said, “besides being a famous name, let me know. I bet if we combine our networks we can get the entire industry to show up. We could be the next Met Gala.”

Seungcheol laughed. “Find me an Anna Wintour and then we’ll talk about being the next Met Gala.”

Jeonghan’s memories hadn’t quite captured the essence of what it was like to hear a genuine laugh from Seungcheol. He didn’t know if they ever could.

“One step at a time,” Jeonghan agreed.

“So. Anyway. Now that we have each other’s numbers, we can talk more about the show and the logistics and stuff. I’m sure you have better things to do than talk to a random photographer, so I won’t keep you.”

“You’re not a random photographer,” Jeonghan said before he could stop himself.

(His stupid, dumbfuck mouth.)

Seungcheol sighed. “Fine. I’m sure you have better things to do than talk to me, a specific photographer.”

Suddenly, they had taken a hard left out of professional territory and straight into some ditch by the side of the road full of mud, except the mud was past history and some pretty terrible things that Jeonghan had done in his twenties.

“And you have better things to do than talk to an ex-model about fashion,” Jeonghan replied.

“I guess.”

“See you around.”

Jeonghan, for some reason, was inordinately proud of hanging up first.

* * *

“So,” Jisoo said, looking up at Jeonghan through her eyelashes in a way that might be attractive if he was into that, but considering who he was and their shared history, was just cute. “How did the chat with Seungcheol go?”

Jeonghan stared down at the confection of food colouring and artificial flavouring and tapioca that was supposed to be his bubble tea. It was a little much for him, to be honest, and definitely something that Jisoo was into more than Jeonghan was. He was just here because it seemed that the two of them hadn’t seen each other in ages and it was safe to be in public with her because she was probably one of the only women he could be seen in public with without dating rumours suddenly appearing in the papers.

“Fine, no thanks to you.”

“What do you mean?” Jisoo said, swirling her straw around in her drink. “I’m the one who made that conversation happen, Jeonghan. Be a little more grateful, please.”

The words would be harsh if Jisoo wasn’t grinning.

“Okay, fine,” Jeonghan retaliated, smiling a little himself. “Let me bow down to you now, Your Majesty, She Who Knows Best. Gimme a second to get down on the floor.”

It took a few moments before Jeonghan realized that Jisoo’s laidback stance, legs crossed so that one delicate pump was this close to dangling right off her foot, was expectant.

“You don’t think I’m actually going to get on my knees for you, do you?”

“I mean, it’d be nice if it was anyone other than you,” Jisoo shrugged. “See, usually people getting on their knees for me is a prelude to something quite fun, but with you, it’s just weird.”

Jeonghan scrunched up his nose. “Sometimes I forget you have a sex life.”

“Why, ‘cause we’re always talking about yours?”

“What sex life?” Jeonghan commented wryly. He had tried his hardest, no pun intended, to forget Seungcheol by smothering the scent of him with someone else. It was the kind of terrible coping strategy that Jeonghan specialized in.

But it was hard, and it was ineffective. Because the downside to trying to replace Choi Seungcheol with a pretty girl was that the two were very, very different in some pretty fundamental ways. Not the least of which was the softer jawlines and the longer hair.

So Jeonghan had sort of given up, and basically abstained unless he was absolutely, out-of-his-mind drunk.

“Your past sex life, then,” Jisoo said, unperturbed.

Jeonghan drank deeply from his bubble tea. Like he expected, it was an explosion of sugar and mango on his tongue, but it was better than bringing up past ghosts right here, right now, in a public bubble tea store. No matter how many years had passed, Jeonghan could never ever afford to sin this publicly.

(He wasn’t a Big Bang member. He couldn’t do illegal drugs and get away with it, and he certainly couldn’t be gay and keep his career. Say what you would about him, but Jeonghan knew his place in the world.)

And that was the difference between him and Seungcheol in the end, wasn’t it? As he’d predicted, his ex had come out in a lowkey manner just over a year after Jeonghan had chosen himself over the one truly great thing left in his life.

(No offence to Jisoo or anything, but she could never fill the space Seungcheol had left, and she wasn’t meant to.)

Choi Seungcheol was a braver and more honest man than Yoon Jeonghan could ever be, and it was quite possibly the one thing Jeonghan had known and respected from the day they’d met as eighteen-year-old kids in that tiny university dorm room.

“Let’s not do this in a public space,” Jeonghan said.

Jisoo shrugged. “Alright,” she said, and sucked hard on her straw. “Tell me about how the chat with Seungcheol went, then. Properly.”

Jeonghan shifted his shoulders in a slight movement that was meant to be a shrug.

“We talked,” he said, helpless. “It was...Jisoo, it was so professional.”

“What makes you comment on that?”

“I guess it was painfully so.”

Jisoo kindly refrained from sharing her opinion on the implications of that sentence, despite Jeonghan practically seeing the words forming on her tongue.

(She had always been a better person than him. Jeonghan was a consummate sinner, whereas Jisoo actually cared and went to church and shit. Jeonghan was probably well on his way to both lung and liver cancer, whereas Jisoo barely even drank, and she had successfully quit smoking years ago. How was it that Jeonghan always surrounded himself with people that were infinitely better than he could ever be? Or maybe it was that Jeonghan was just the worst.)

“And,” he continued, after a few moments, “there was this one moment where we were almost comfortable with each other and I made a joke and he _laughed_ , Jisoo, and I think I died.”

“Why?”

“I thought I remembered it all,” Jeonghan confessed, “but I didn’t. There’s nothing like a genuine Choi Seungcheol laugh.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said wryly. “I’ve never been obsessed with Seungcheol’s anything, least of all his laugh.”

“You’re obsessed with his love life,” Jeonghan commented, a little snark slipping into his voice.

“I already told you why,” Jisoo responded with an arched eyebrow. “Oh,” she said suddenly, “I just remembered. My agent was showing me this script and said that we should do it together. It’d be kind of fun, don’t you think?”

“For me to pretend I’m in love with you?” Jeonghan asked, laughing a little. “No, I don’t think.”

Jisoo laughed, bright and happy. “You’re supposed to be an actor. Isn’t pretending to be something you’re not your job?”

“You’re my kryptonite,” Jeonghan said, semi-seriously. “If I try to act out a romance arc with you I think I’d look into your eyes right before the kiss and break down laughing.”

“We’ve kissed before, though,” Jisoo said, still laughing. “How hard can it be?”

“Pretty fucking hard,” Jeonghan deadpanned. The two of them were being less-than-discreet at the moment, but this was a little bubble tea place tucked away in the heart of Gangnam, the kind of place that celebrities like them frequented and, often, owned.

Maybe that would be his post-acting career. A little café. Jeonghan wasn’t sure he would mind. There was a certain simplicity to it; waking up early to set the machines working, standing there in the quiet of pre-dawn warmth listening to the sound of percolating coffee. Writing orders down, working with his hands, and making latte art was far from the worst or most stressful thing he could do in his retirement.

Jeonghan had never gotten his chance to be a broke barista in college. Maybe that was what this fantasy was.

“I mean,” he continued, “sorry, Jisoo, but you’re not my type. In a pretty fundamental way.”

Jisoo waved it off and looked back down at her drink. “In all seriousness, though,” she said, sipping from the cup, “it’s a pretty cute script. A rom-com that’s basically ripe for fanfiction. If we took it, you’d be a florist, and I’d be a Korean-American student who just moved back from the States. And,” she said, looking gleeful, “the best part is that we’d be neighbours.”

“Cool,” Jeonghan replied, the way he said the word making it clear that he didn’t think it was cool at all. “So? It’s not like we’re roommates. That’s the ultimate fanfic romance trope.”

“Hey,” Jisoo said, perking up, “that’s why you and Seungcheol are meant to be!”

“Ha ha,” Jeonghan deadpanned, “I’m rolling on the floor with laughter.”

“Of course you are, I’m hilarious,” Jisoo said, flipping her hair, and then turned serious again. “Back to the script. Don’t you think it’d be fun for the two of us to do a nice, fluffy project? It’ll get all the ratings, come on. And what’s more fun than working with friends?”

“Why are you so intent on getting me to agree to this?” he asked, curious as he swirled around what he had left of his bubble tea.

Jisoo shrugged, mouth quirking unevenly in that odd way it did when she was trying to think of the right thing to say. “My last two dramas have been depressing as fuck,” she said, “and I just want to do something nice and fun for once.”

“Why me?”

Jisoo drank down the last dregs of her bubble tea. “You make me feel safe,” she said, nonchalant. “And I’m comfortable around you.”

Despite their age, despite the fact that Jeonghan has known this wonderful, maddening woman for seven years and shared most of his embarrassing stories and secrets with her the very first night they’d met, his heart blushed.

It had been Jisoo who had acted as his therapist these past few years. Jisoo who had pulled him back from every ledge, looked at his every issue and commented with both honesty and acerbic wit. Jisoo, Jisoo, Jisoo. Despite Jeonghan’s many, many problems with thinking that nobody cared about him or would stay with him, Jisoo hadn’t jumped ship and had instead stayed with him through it all.

Fuck. He wasn’t even drunk and suddenly all he could think of was just how much he loved his best friend.

“Thanks,” Jeonghan said, soft and a little more awkward than he’d like.

“Don’t thank me for being honest,” Jisoo said.

“Hey,” Jeonghan said, tossing what he had left of his drink down his throat, “honesty is hard to come by these days.”

Jisoo laughed. “Not from me.”

“Promise?” and he was joking but at the same time, he really wasn’t.

“Pinky promise.”

* * *

Somehow, after seven years of being perfectly fine barely talking or meeting, Jeonghan started seeing Choi Seungcheol _everywhere._

And not just reminders. Literally, he saw Seungcheol everywhere.

When he went to the gym (which was in his _own fucking apartment building_ ), Seungcheol and Jisoo were there, chatting by the treadmills and clearly sweaty. Jeonghan had thought that he and Jisoo were workout partners, and also seemed to recall that Seungcheol didn’t even _like_ exercise, but he had steered himself away to the other side of the gym and lifted some weights even though that was the opposite of what he was supposed to be doing, all because he was too scared to approach the treadmills, where he usually hung out.

His drama had moved to a small city outside of Seoul to film on location for a few scenes and somehow, Seungcheol turned out to be there on a day trip. Jeonghan caught sight of him with someone he didn’t recognize, trekking through a field in the distance. Of course, his ex was lugging a tripod and his camera case as he moved along, and Jeonghan would never admit it but it took the director three times to get his attention after that, and after a few takes they took a break because Jeonghan had been too distracted.

This one he should have expected, but when Jeonghan went to Seoul Fashion Week with Jisoo, as he did every year, Seungcheol appeared like a Ghost of Mistakes (?) Past. Jeonghan had been enjoying himself perfectly well, thank you very much, taking in the sights from the comfortable front-row seat he’d been assigned rather than his vantage point in his previous career, which was usually a quick glimpse of an outfit in the crowded and rowdy dressing room before it went onto the runway. Jisoo had been seated right next to him, occasionally leaning into him to whisper some comment about the clothes or the model or the designer that was perhaps not the nicest, and Jeonghan had been laughing quietly. It had been great, the kind of glittering moment he collected like women and dragons collected jewels, to string on a thread and wear around his neck.

And of course, as the two of them spilled out of the building along with the rest of the crowd, he quite literally bumped into photographer Choi Seungcheol, camera still dangling around his neck and probably at great risk of getting damaged by the throng.

“Sorry,” Jeonghan mumbled, not making eye contact. In a big city like Seoul, and at large events like this one, one couldn’t really afford to apologize to everyone you bumped into. It was city-dweller etiquette not to, in fact. Everyone just hurt each other a little bit and then got on with their lives.

(And God, he knew a lot about that.)

“Jeonghan?”

Jeonghan looked away from the path towards the road and at the man he’d just bumped into. “Seungcheol,” he said weakly. “Imagine seeing you here.”

“Took the words right out of my mouth.”

Jeonghan’s arm snapped out behind him to grab Jisoo’s wrist and then haul her in closer towards him. A surprised squeak escaped her as she fell into his side.

“Nice try,” he said, turning his head so the words were half-spoken into her hair. “Don’t you _dare_ ditch me with him.”

Jisoo attempted an awkward laugh. “Oops?”

“Jisoo,” Seungcheol greeted, something like a smile in his voice. Jeonghan didn’t dare to look straight at him to see if there was an actual smile on his face too. His heart was hammering, throwing itself again and again against the confines of his ribs. He was worried that if he looked right at the man he’d made the choice to throw away seven years ago, his heart would finally break free and fall, like a rotten tomato, to the floor, leaving a large stain on the ground.

“I’m here for a magazine,” Seungcheol said. “To take photos of the show.”

Jeonghan was looking steadfastly at a point just over Seungcheol’s left ear. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Jisoo stifling a smile, and the grip she had on his elbow was tightening as she desperately tried to keep herself upright.

Apparently, this was all very funny to her.

“We’re here just to watch, like boring people,” Jisoo said, seemingly realizing that Jeonghan had just about exhausted his conversational capabilities for the day. “Jeonghan and I come here every year. It’s a tradition.”

“Haven’t you two been coming here every year since the start of your careers?” Seungcheol asked, voice a carefully cultivated kind of fond yet amused. It was painfully reminiscent of how he used to talk to Jeonghan, usually when he had done something stupid like not handed in a completed assignment or continued drinking vodka shots despite knowing his limits or left a pot of water to boil for too long and burned it.

All small, domestic little things that they had shared before, as quickly as it began, the two of them called it quits and walked away from each other.

“Well, yeah,” Jisoo said, doing that little thing where she shrugged a shoulder in acknowledgement, “but now we’re just people in the audience, and that’s a very different feeling, you know? Like if you suddenly became the person being photographed instead of the photographer.”

Jeonghan wondered, in a sort of detached fashion, if Jisoo had always been this chatty, or if this was just a thing she did when she was trying desperately to make two people who had no chance get back together.

“I don’t think I would enjoy being photographed,” Seungcheol said, eyebrows furrowing as he thought about it.

(Traitorously, Jeonghan’s mind whispered, _I have a million photographs of you and you never objected._ )

“Well, we enjoy looking at the clothes instead of wearing them and hoping to God we don’t fall on our faces,” Jisoo said, smiling. “Hey, you two are working on the charity show together, right?”

Seungcheol made eye contact with Jeonghan, despite his valiant attempts to continue looking at the bird perched on a parked car in the distance. One of Seungcheol’s eyebrows quirked, just the tiniest bit, and Jeonghan felt like he had been stabbed.

(Seungcheol had used to do that whenever Jeonghan said something particularly funny or ridiculous, and it might have been seven years but there was nothing like coming face to face with someone you had once loved and their every mannerism.)

“Yeah,” Jeonghan forced out, and his voice was surprisingly steady. “We are. Unless he doesn’t want me.”

He didn’t know how it had happened, but suddenly there was a flaring current of tension running between him and Seungcheol, electric and terrifying and dangerous. His eyes had locked onto Seungcheol’s and would not let go. No matter. He wasn’t all that sure that he wanted to look away.

“Why wouldn’t I want you?” Seungcheol said, voice taking on that light amusement that he did so well despite the flicker of something else within his eyes.

(And _damn_ , now that Jeonghan looked properly, Seungcheol had grown up well.)

Jeonghan’s lips curled up into a smile. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Jisoo, rapt as what was essentially a drama come to life played out in front of her and a crowd of people pushing past them that couldn’t care less, despite the relative fame of both Jeonghan and Jisoo.

“Right,” he said, tongue darting out to wet his lips. His mouth was suddenly dry. What was up with that? “Why wouldn’t you want me?”

In a different universe, either Seungcheol or Jisoo might have spluttered at that. Instead, Jisoo just grinned even wider, while Seungcheol tilted his chin up in a slight acknowledgement of what Jeonghan had just said.

“You’re an asset to the show, Jeonghan,” Seungcheol said, tone rigidly professional. The only thing that could possibly make his words more distant was the addition of an honorific or a change in speech level, as if they were strangers. “I’m glad to have someone like you willing to take on such a large role.”

“Jisoo,” Jeonghan said, tugging on his friend’s arm while maintaining eye contact with Seungcheol, “why don’t you join our show? It’s for a good cause, after all,” and he saw the understanding of that reference flare in Jisoo’s eyes along with a bright dash of amusement.

“I wish I could,” she said, not sounding as if she wished she could at all, “but I’ve got so many projects lined up for the next while that I don’t think I could give it the attention it deserves. But you don’t have anything else until the summer, isn’t that right, Jeonghan?”

He didn’t and she fucking knew it.

“You already know,” he said, fake-cheery.

“That reminds me,” Seungcheol said suddenly. “Congratulations on completing your drama, Jeonghan.”

“Thank you,” Jeonghan said, a little surprised that Seungcheol had remembered.

“I have a meeting lined up with Jessica next week,” Seungcheol continued, and any thoughts about his ex remembering his drama filming dates out of simple interest were instantly evaporated. “I was thinking that if you came she’d be more likely to agree to join our project.”

“Jessica...Jung?” Jeonghan asked, unsure.

“Yeah,” Seungcheol said, sheepish, a hand coming up to rub the back of his neck. It made him look ten years younger. Like he was twenty-two and still in love with his best friend.

Jeonghan’s mouth split into a wide grin before he could stop himself. “You would never be able to function around her,” he teased.

“I know,” Seungcheol groaned. “That’s why I need you to be there with me. So I don’t make a fool out of myself.”

Seungcheol was a notorious Girls’ Generation fan. Jeonghan had vivid memories of being plagued by bubblegum pop earworms in their university days, him trying to study on one side of the room while Seungcheol played something like Gee or Oh from his bed at the lowest volume possible, which was still too loud for Jeonghan in the midst of his studies.

It was hard to believe, looking back, that Jeonghan had become yet another statistic, yet another liberal arts grad with a job nowhere near related to his degree, when he had been so sure he wouldn’t be one of those kids. Yoon Jeonghan at age eighteen, as eighteen-year-olds were wont to do, had thought everything would go according to plan. He’d been so sure of himself, so absolutely settled in his conviction that he would do something related to art history, curate collections for a museum or an art gallery.

How incredibly stupid, now that he thought about it. But it was the easily forgivable stupidity of youth, of being a child that thought you were an adult.

“Glad to help,” Jeonghan said, smile more natural. “Somebody needs to stop you from bringing your SNSD album collection and asking her to sign all of them. I’ll take one for the team.”

Seungcheol tilted his head back a little and laughed. He looked so young like this; hands in his coat pockets, face still unlined and smooth even when he laughed.

This was good. The light teasing, the familiarity of a past history without it weighing him down – it was more than he had ever dared to have again between him and Seungcheol.

This was enough. This was more than enough.

“Yeah,” Seungcheol said, still smiling a little. “Yeah. So, I’ll call you?”

“Sure,” Jeonghan said. “See you around.”

“See you,” Seungcheol echoed, then turned around and walked away from Jeonghan one more time.

“Well, that went well, didn’t it? You guys even talked like normal people instead of strangers!” Jisoo said, mouth next to his ear.

“Fuck off, Jisoo,” Jeonghan said, but there was no bite behind his words, and all Jisoo did was laugh.

“You’ll thank me later.”

“Like hell I will,” Jeonghan muttered, but he could feel the truth in her words, like an apple seed tucked away in the core; hidden, full of life, and filled with fucking cyanide.

* * *

“So, like,” Jisoo said, munching on a perfectly golden fry as she lay curled up on Jeonghan’s couch, “you’re still lowkey in love with him, right?”

“Jisoo,” Jeonghan said in warning. He poked his head up from the kitchen cabinet he had been rummaging through. “You come to my home, eat my McDonald’s, and dare to try and psychoanalyze me too?”

“Uh,” Jisoo said, continuing to eat Jeonghan’s entire house empty of his fast food, “yup.”

Jeonghan watched, a little captivated but mostly in shock, as Jisoo basically burnt through an entire container of medium fries.

“Not to be your manager or anything,” he said, leaning against the kitchen counter, “but don’t you have a project coming up that you should be dieting for?”

Jisoo paused to think for a moment, a plastic straw attached to a cup full of processed sugar halfway to her mouth. “Yes,” she acknowledged, “but I don’t give a fuck.”

Jeonghan laughed in shock. Jisoo was much less prone to swearing than Jeonghan himself was; it all contributed to her clean image, even among the models and actors and idols that were their colleagues. So it was all the more surprising when she let a few expletives leave her mouth.

“I wish I could say that’s a mood,” Jeonghan admitted, then grabbed himself a wine glass and poured himself a bit of wine. “Cheers to that.”

Jisoo tilted her head and watched him drink with a strange expression on her face. “Have you been eating lately?” she asked, brows furrowed.

“Yeah, why?” Jeonghan replied.

“You worry me sometimes,” was all she said, contemplatively munching on a fry.

“Only sometimes?” he said wryly. The way Jisoo acted, an outsider would think that Jeonghan needed to go to rehab or something. She was always worried about him, always asking after him and his health.

He didn’t even pretend he hated it, anymore. They were too old for such petty games, and there was something about someone who had zero relation to you and wasn’t being paid by you still caring about your well-being that was comforting.

It had grown unfamiliar, that feeling. Despite his good relationship with his manager, his agent, and the staff at the company, it wasn’t the same. It was like when your waiter was nice to you. How did you find the difference between them doing it of their own free will, and them doing it because you were paying them?

“Okay, all the time,” Jisoo admitted. “And you smoke so much, you’ll probably accidentally starve yourself because you have no appetite after you smoke and you’ll forget to eat.”

“I’m not a baby,” Jeonghan said, teasing. “You don’t have to watch over me and make sure I eat, mom.”

“Don’t call me that,” Jisoo said, throwing a hand over her eyes dramatically. “Having a child is basically my biggest nightmare.”

“Why? I’m sure your parents want you to,” Jeonghan said, sitting on the arm of the couch. Jisoo’s long, model legs were curled up, yes, but they did take up most of the space on the thing and he didn’t quite feel like making her mad at him.

Jisoo groaned. “They do. I’m the only child and they want grandchildren, so it’s my job to give that to them.”

“This is why I have a younger sister,” he said, drinking more of his wine. Talking about parents was a fraught topic for the two of them; Jeonghan had always had a massive sense of insecurity when it came to personal relationships, and Jisoo felt her burden as only child more and more acutely as time went on and the people who raised inched closer to their inevitable deaths.

See, the thing about being the only child was that Jisoo was the only person who had the responsibility of sending money to her parents to pay back her debt as their child. She was the only one whose job it was to take care of them in their old age. She was the one who was going to have to make sure they wanted for nothing in their LA house, that they were healthy and keeping up with their doctor’s appointments, that they were on top of their own chronic diseases and daily medications.

Except she was an ocean away, and Jeonghan couldn’t imagine what it must be like to sit, twiddling your thumbs in South Korea, knowing that if your parents had a sudden heart attack you wouldn’t be there to talk to the doctor or translate medical terms from English to Korean for your parents.

Not that either of them were at the age where they had to actually worry about their parents falling victim to sudden health complications, but it was a legitimate worry.

“I wish I had one of those,” Jisoo said, offering what was left of the fries to Jeonghan. “So she could stay in America and help our parents and I could just do my own fucking thing without them trying to set me up with a boyfriend and 2.5 kids.”

Jeonghan took the fries. “Yeah, well. They’re your parents. That’s their job. They do it because they love you, and they want you to have the best life possible and that’s what their idea of a good life is.”

“Look at you, sounding all mature,” Jisoo said, seeming slightly impressed. Unable to be deterred for long, though, she quickly said, “But speaking of love, that’s an emotion you have in your heart for Choi Seungcheol, right?”

Jeonghan threw his free arm in the air and pushed at Jisoo’s feet so he’d have space to sit on the couch. “How am I supposed to know? We just talked like normal people for the first time in seven years like... a week ago.”

“You should have seen yourself,” Jisoo continued, ignoring petty things like reality, “The sexual tension was just _sizzling._ I mean, if the rest of South Korea weren’t so homophobic, anyone would have seen it.”

“Homophobia doesn’t mean they don’t see what’s in front of them, Jisoo,” Jeonghan pointed out. “If it were there I’m sure they would have seen it. You’re a shipper.”

“But you just said it! They see what they want to see, and _because_ they’re homophobic, they can’t see the copious amounts of want in your eyes whenever you look at Seungcheol.”

“Stop being so dramatic,” Jeonghan said as he sipped on his wine, aware that the two of them were acting very much like characters in a drama right now, complete with an alcoholic prop. This was so incredibly _ajumma_ of him, to sit on the couch with his best friend and drink wine until his teeth stained red. God, when had he gotten this old?

“I’m just saying what I see,” Jisoo said, putting two hands up in a show of faux surrender. “And what I see is forbidden love and desperate desire.”

“You should start writing romance novels. The trashy, Dollar Store kind.”

“Mm, maybe that can be my hobby in retirement.”

Jeonghan laughed. “Imagine the harm to your image that _that_ would do.”

“You’re so obsessed with image, Jeonghan,” Jisoo said. “It can’t be healthy.”

“It’s not me that’s obsessed with image,” Jeonghan said, setting his near-empty wine glass down on the coffee table. “It’s the rest of the world. I have to pay attention so that I can stay alive.”

“Mmhm,” Jisoo said, clearly unconvinced. She took the wine glass and offered it to Jeonghan again. “I think you’ll need to keep drinking if you want me to accept that you’re just drunk and not delusional.”

“Hey, deluding myself is a talent. I have like a PhD in Self-Delusion, if past experience is anything to go by. Or maybe that’s just what it’s like to be twenty-five and famous and constantly sleep-deprived.”

Jisoo looked at him for a long moment and then said, “Either your ability to hold alcohol has severely deteriorated or you pre-gamed before I got here, because that is something tipsy Jeonghan would say.”

Jeonghan tipped his head back and practically inhaled the rest of his wine. When he put it down on the coffee table, he did it a little harder than he had meant to, thereby sort of proving Jisoo’s point about him not being totally sober.

“I might have drunk a bit,” he admitted. “Not too much, though.”

“Takes a lot to get you tipsy.”

“Not anymore,” Jeonghan shrugged. “I drink less than I used to. My one vice that’s still the same is cigarettes. Even now I can burn through a pack a day when I’m stressed.”

Jisoo sighed. “I feel like I need to spend twice as much time praying for you as I do for other people.”

“What, why?”

“You smoke like a demon,” Jisoo began, ticking Jeonghan’s issues off on her fingers, “your drinking is hardly healthy, you’re constantly stressed out by the thought of your public image, you’re usually deluding yourself about something, and you have fewer friends than I had when I first moved here. And I was from the States.”

Jeonghan stood up. “I’m going to need more wine to deal with this amount of savagery.”

“That’s exactly what I mean! Alcohol as a coping mechanism is anything but healthy. This is why I have to pray for you so much.”

“Oh my God, Jisoo,” Jeonghan said, finally frustrated enough to say what had been lurking in the back of his mind as he listened to Jisoo list all the reasons to pray for him, “Jesus can’t fucking fix me.”

Silence. Jeonghan didn’t dare to look back and see Jisoo’s reaction. Instead, he busied himself with carefully pouring another glass of wine as the prolonged and frosty quiet emanating from Jisoo’s position on the sofa seemed to somehow ring louder and louder within his ears.

“You can be such a fucking asshole sometimes, Jeonghan.”

The only vaguely promising part of that sentence was that it hadn’t been accompanied by the telltale rustling of clothes that would mean Jisoo was leaving.

“I’m trying,” Jisoo said, and here Jeonghan could hear the slight shifting of her getting more comfortable on the couch, “okay? I’m trying to help you, and I’m trying to be patient and understanding when you pull shit like this, because I know that who you are when you’re tipsy and frustrated isn’t the same as who you are normally.”

The amount of swearing that was going on right now was slightly worrying to Jeonghan, if only because Jisoo so rarely swore that he didn’t know what the sudden uptick in cursing meant.

“But it’s really fucking hard to do all those things when you’re acting like this,” Jisoo said, and here was where Jeonghan turned around, wine glass in hand. Jisoo was sitting on the couch, feet on the carpeted ground instead of curled up. Her relaxed bun had been taken out at some point and now lay in waves around her face, messy and frustrated. She suddenly looked every inch of her thirty-two years and more; while Jisoo was generally known to netizens as a celebrity that seemed to be ageing backwards, right now, Jeonghan couldn’t see it at all.

He felt suddenly and immensely guilty for doing this to her. Jeonghan was dead weight; all he did was drag other people down. What life could Jisoo be living right now without him? She certainly wouldn’t be here, in his apartment, exhausted and frustrated and very, very far from the glamorous image she was supposed to have.

“Jisoo,” Jeonghan began, setting his wine glass down and stepping towards his friend, “I’m sorry. I know that’s not enough, I know I’m an asshole that you probably did some terrible shit in the last life to even deserve to be around, but it’s all I have.”

If he were a few years younger, if he were still trapped in the mindset he’d had back when he was being a manipulative bitch and fucking Seungcheol on the side, he would have probably broken down right then and there. As a twenty-something, Jeonghan had lived under the constant fear that everybody would leave him eventually, and Seungcheol was just postponing an inevitable departure. With hindsight’s perfect vision, he could now see that it had been Jeonghan himself who created the circumstances for an inevitable departure to begin with, out of a misguided attempt to (consciously or subconsciously) make Seungcheol leave before he decided to, and therefore let Jeonghan not get his heart broken.

A fat lot of good that did, since Jeonghan’s heart ended up in pieces anyway.

Point was, this moment with Jisoo would have played into all of young Jeonghan’s insecurities. Now, though, he knew better. Jisoo might be smart, but she was a special kind of stupid too, because she would never leave Jeonghan. And if that wasn’t character development, then what was?

Pity it took him seven years to get to this point in his arc.

(He might be an actor now, but the vocabulary of literary analysis he’d learned in high school and university electives had never left him. Maybe Jeonghan was so obsessed with image and reputation now because he’d picked up an addiction to narratives when he was younger.)

Jisoo sighed. “You’ve become more self-aware,” she said with a tone of vague surprise. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

“You met me when I was twenty-five, Jisoo,” he replied as he picked up his wine glass again and came to sit next to Jisoo. “I was hardly done growing up at that point.”

“I think I was,” Jisoo mused.

“You’ve always been better than me, that’s not surprising.”

Jisoo laughed. “Are you trying to flatter me?”

“I’d never,” he said, and it was more honest than the situation warranted. The way he said it was raw, vulnerable, and open, in direct contrast to the teasing banter of just a few moments before. Jisoo felt the change in tone too and looked up at him in acknowledgement.

Looking at her, Jeonghan was struck by a sudden realization of how grateful he was to have her around; a sentiment he probably didn’t express enough. Jisoo was infinitely better than him, checked his worst impulses and refused to let his bullshit go unrecognized. Jeonghan’s nickname might be Angel, but Jisoo was the real angel between the two of them. Not to mention she had a wicked sense of humour.

“I believe that,” Jisoo replied. “You generally only lie to yourself.”

“What am I lying to myself about?” Jeonghan asked, trying to laugh it off but also dead serious in a way that he was sure Jisoo could read easily.

“You’re still in love with Seungcheol,” she said, like this was a common knowledge sort of fact right up there with ‘other humans exist’ and ‘the Earth is a planet’.

Jeonghan just sat there for a long while, wine glass-bearing hand still frozen halfway to his mouth as he contemplated what Jisoo had just said.

What was love, really? Was it the swelling feeling in his heart he had when he looked at Jisoo, eyebrows furrowed as she studied a script, or rambling on about a novel she had just finished reading, or hair a mess as she watched the first episode of one of her own dramas? Was it the uncontrollable smile that pulled on his lips whenever his little sister called him on the phone?

Or was it the immense pride he had felt looking at Seungcheol’s work over the years, progressively better, progressively more acclaimed, until this man his life had once been full of rose all the way to the top of the industry like he deserved? Was it the half-sad, half-bitter smile that came out when he saw Seungcheol’s photos on a billboard, heard one of Seungcheol’s favourite songs, smelled Seungcheol’s favourite food cooking in a night market?

(Did the other man even know the effect he had on Jeonghan? Seungcheol had ruined Girls’ Generation for him. That was what he had the power to do.)

When he was younger, Jeonghan had wondered; what was it like to love someone so all-encompassingly that they ruin entire cities for you when they left, that they can turn you off certain cuts of meat or brands of alcohol, that even when you’re trying to drown yourself and forget, you see them in the thing you’re using to forget them?

After Seungcheol, he had known. He had loved Seungcheol then. Did he still love Seungcheol now?

(Jeonghan thought back to that accidental meeting with Seungcheol outside the fashion show; how Seungcheol’s laugh had made him feel, how alive he had felt in the biting air of late fall in Seoul just making small talk with him.)

“Oh my God,” he said, setting his wine glass down and turning to Jisoo. “I’m still in love with Seungcheol.”

“More self-awareness,” Jisoo said, exaggerating her surprise. “That’s new.”

“I didn’t think I was!” he said, defensive. “I mean – it’s been seven years! Any sensible person would also think they were over it.”

“If you still have his phone number, you’re not over it,” Jisoo declared, and Jeonghan flung himself back against the sofa, arms flung out and narrowly missing an unimpressed Jisoo.

“How do you even know that I still have his number?” Jeonghan asked, eyes closed. He heard Jisoo shift around a little, and then, a wry response of, “I know your phone password and the name is three X emoji, who else could it be,” left her mouth.

“You know me too well.”

“No such thing. Besides, you need someone like me in your life to make you have basic revelations. See: five seconds ago.”

“Oh, stop it, will you?”

* * *

Jeonghan had been living in the world of celebrities for a long, long time, but he had to admit, meeting Jessica Jung in the flesh was still lowkey overwhelming, even for him.

See, here was the thing. Jeonghan and Seungcheol were both part of a generation of children and teens raised on second wave K-pop. He had grown up on Big Bang and Super Junior, Wonder Girls and Girls’ Generation. These were literally his idols. If he wasn’t mistaken, he had had a poster of Gee-era Girls’ Generation on the walls of his childhood bedroom. He had worshipped at Jessica Jung’s feet when he was younger, and so had Seungcheol.

While Jeonghan had grown used to meeting famous people by now, sometimes there were a select few that still left him starstruck.

Walking into the Seoul offices of Blanc & Eclare and seeing Jessica Jung standing there in her black ankle boots with the skinny heels, her navy jeans with the bottom rolled up just enough, her light blue button-up shirt with the sleeves pushed up to reveal her forearms, her tan trench coat thrown on over her outfit like a particularly well-chosen afterthought, was enough to make him a teenage fanboy.

And if that was what it was like for him, well, he couldn’t even begin to imagine what Seungcheol was feeling.

“Hello,” Jeonghan said, realizing as he and Seungcheol stood there in front of an ex-Girls’ Generation member that neither of them were talking and they were going to seem awkward, “I’m Jeonghan and this is Seungcheol.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said, red lips lifting into a smile as she extended her hand.

Jeonghan shook it and wondered briefly if Seungcheol was going to snap out of it or if he would have to do this whole thing himself. This wasn’t his project, and to be honest he didn’t think he could sell it as well as Seungcheol functioning at full capacity could.

It would be a real blow to their morale if Jessica didn’t join them, especially with the amount of hero worship Seungcheol had for her.

(Jeonghan wondered, in the back of his mind, when he had started caring about Seungcheol so much, and how he had fallen back into it so easily.)

“Jessica-ssi,” Seungcheol said, seeming to finally turn his brain on, “I’m so glad you’re willing to talk to us about this project. I know you’re busy, so we really appreciate it.”

“Well,” she said, still smiling in that practised way that Jeonghan knew so well, “how could I turn down an invitation to work with someone as accomplished as you, Seungcheol-ssi? And to know that Jeonghan-ssi is returning to modelling just for the show is quite intriguing as well.”

Of course. Seungcheol had been right – Jeonghan’s sudden return to runway fashion was clearly a draw for designers, who were about as gossipy as people in their industry had to be to get by.

“I’m sorry,” Jessica said after an assistant ran up to her and whispered furiously in her ear, “but I’ll only be able to give you two about twenty minutes make your pitch. Is that alright?”

“Not a problem,” Seungcheol assured her, a charming smile coming out to play on his face. Jeonghan’s heart twitched at that; these days, despite him seeing relatively little of Seungcheol, it seemed that every little thing the man did made him look younger, made Jeonghan think of their time together in university.

“Alright, well, how about we sit down and talk this over?” Jessica said, and the three of them went off to a meeting room a little way inside the building.

Jeonghan felt suddenly very out of place; despite his extensive experience pretending to be a businessman in various dramas where he was the tall, rich man come to fall in love with a charming young woman, he was not _actually_ a businessman and had spent very little time handling these kinds of business situations.

Even after all these years, all this time that he had spent pretending to be comfortable in situations where he was anything but (see: trying to stare down an antagonist while a boom mic was dangling in the corner of his vision and the mic wire was slowly falling down his back), Jeonghan was still viscerally aware of just how wrong he was in this picture.

“So,” Jessica said after they had all sat down and made themselves comfortable. Seungcheol somehow looked like a freshman again; bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, full of enthusiasm and a certain kind of fresh-faced naivety that made him appealing to older people who had already lost all that. He was on the edge of his seat, ready to launch into some kind of idealistic spiel about why he was there and what he wanted to do with his life.

Looking at him was enough to make Jeonghan want to be that kid again.

“Tell me about your show,” she said, and spread your hands as if to say, _the floor is yours._

“Alright,” Seungcheol said, took a deep breath, and went right into it.

Jeonghan sat there, rapt, as Seungcheol talked about AIDS and HIV, about how the fashion industry was full of gay men, many of which had been affected by the disease or eventually would be. Seungcheol mentioned casually that he was a gay man himself in the fashion industry, segued into a verbal essay about the importance of charity work, and then finally, finally, took a moment to breathe.

“But _why_ are you doing this?” Jessica asked.

Seungcheol blinked and lapsed for a moment. “I just told you.”

“Why _you?”_ Jessica said. “What made you, specifically, take time out of your career and life to do something like this for free?”

“Well,” Seungcheol said, words slow and measured, “I’ve been sort of advocating for queer people in the industry for a while, and I think fundraising for medical research is, in general, a good thing. And I’ve been exploring themes like these in my work. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I did an editorial called _sins not tragedies_ that was sort of about exploring queer bodies as objects of desire rather than tragic stains on our family honour.”

Jeonghan remembered that editorial. It had made the news when it had dropped, especially in the industry magazines. _Openly Gay Photographer Choi Seungcheol Releases Iconic Editorial_ had been the first headline he’d seen the morning Seungcheol’s grand project came out.

When Jeonghan had, as the title basically begged him to, clicked and kept reading, eager for photos, he had been met with the news that the photos were exclusively in the specific magazine it had been released in, and there had only been one photo that had been disseminated to the press.

One photo was all it took for Jeonghan to buy a copy of the magazine on the spot, just for that editorial.

(It was so Seungcheol, that photo; the smouldering gaze, the way it seemed as if the camera had lingered lovingly on the shadow of the model’s collarbone, on the dip of his chin, the bridge of his nose, the corner of his mouth. Seungcheol could make anybody fall in love with somebody by taking a good photo of them. Maybe that was what had happened with them; Seungcheol had practised his photography skills on Jeonghan one too many times in college and accidentally made himself fall for a man that had been too broken and delusional to love anybody properly.)

That editorial, _sins not tragedies_ , had changed the way people saw the extensive community of queer men in the industry. The men featured in the editorial, all queer and quite a few of them dating, had been unashamed. Like Seungcheol had said, they were anything but stains on family honour in those photos. The way they looked, the way they made him feel; it was as if they were the heroes of the movies and dramas Jeonghan lived his life in. There had been a series of photos within the editorial of one couple kissing each other, and Jeonghan was a little reluctant to admit that he had stared at it for a long, long time when he first saw it.

And maybe that was why he was here. Maybe that, and not just the nostalgic nicotine of a moment of weakness, was what had made Jeonghan agree to work with Seungcheol on this project. Because that editorial from two years ago had taken his entire world and tilted it, just a little, so it seemed that everything he had looked at before had been just the slightest bit off and he had never realized it but now, now he saw.

That was the power of Seungcheol’s art, and Jeonghan knew he could never compare, but like a moth to a flame, he was pulled to it anyway, because who didn’t want a small piece of that? There was a reason famous movie directors and actors and artists had a posse of hangers-on; everybody wanted to be closer to talent. Especially when they had none of their own.

“I remember that editorial,” Jessica said, mouth curling up. “So would you say this is a continuation of that?”

“Yeah,” Seungcheol said. “This charity fundraiser feels like a natural extension of the work I’ve been doing, and I’ve been in the fashion industry since I was twenty-something. Making the fundraiser a fashion show is basically the only way I know how to raise money,” he joked.

Jessica cracked a smile, one that seemed more genuine this time than Jeonghan had ever expected to see out of her. That wasn’t to disparage her. It was just that Jeonghan, like most veterans of this particular industry, had learned that most people didn’t let themselves be genuine around you for a while, and you should do the same.

So to see that even someone with as illustrious a career as Jessica Jung could let herself be genuine in a millisecond of a moment like this one was refreshing. “Well, I can see you’re very passionate about this,” she said. “So the idea is that because of famous models and designers, people will pay more to come to the show and it will all go to a good cause. Yes?”

“Yes, exactly,” Seungcheol said, smiling back. “So you can see why I would want you to participate.”

Jeonghan just sat there and listened. He was here to do what he did best – smile and nod. It was what he had done as a model, and now he was right back to his roots, so in a way, it had all come full circle, hadn’t it? Here he was, modelling again, Seungcheol by his side, smiling and looking pretty. He was just seven years older and no longer manipulatively fucking his best friend while living in the back of a gilded closet.

That situation had been untenable no matter how you looked at it. Jeonghan was just glad that Seungcheol had seen it before he had, because if it had been left up to Jeonghan to do it, the two of them probably would have ended a lot more acrimoniously.

Here was the question that twenty-five-year-old Jeonghan hadn’t asked; how long could one person possibly live in denial? How long could all the evidence keep slapping him in the face before he finally woke up to it? Jeonghan at age twenty-five had wanted desperately not to be gay. Unfortunately, that wasn’t how the world worked.

“Are there going to be any female models?” Jessica asked, one hand coming to play with a thin necklace that Jeonghan hadn’t noticed before. “I hope you do realize I mostly design for women.”

“Yeah, of course,” Seungcheol said. “We were going to get Hong Jisoo but she’s busy. It’ll mostly be female models.”

“And Jeonghan came out of fashion retirement for this?” Jessica asked, eyes turning to him.

“What can I say,” Jeonghan said, shrugging a little, trying his hardest to be charming, “I’m a believer in the cause. And,” here he turned to look at Seungcheol, “Seungcheol’s always been my favourite photographer. I’m lucky to get a chance to work with him.”

There was something in the way Seungcheol looked at him, at those words, that Jeonghan both desperately wanted to parse and was terrified to think about.

“You never told me that,” Seungcheol said, and Jeonghan was painfully aware of Jessica’s curious eyes trained on the two of them.

Jeonghan swallowed. His throat had suddenly become dry. “Maybe not in so many words.”

(Surely he wasn’t the only one out of the two of them suddenly thrown back seven years ago, to an opulent apartment devoid of warmth, to two men forcefully ripping themselves apart, to an _I love you, but it’s not enough._ They’d always been so bad at just saying things, always opting for subtext and implications.)

Seungcheol didn’t say anything for almost too long. It was just nearing the point where Jessica would have opened her mouth to interrupt them – Jeonghan had seen the decision settle in her eyes – when Seungcheol finally said, “Thank you.”

“For what?” Jeonghan said, trying to laugh it off. “You have legions of fans.”

“For all those years of loving my work. That’s not easy to come by.”

( _For all those years of loving me_ , Jeonghan thought. But maybe he was reading too much into it. After all, despite that look in Seungcheol’s eyes that he had once been so acquainted with, the look that meant deep meaning hidden behind socially acceptable words, who was to say that the artist was their art? If Jeonghan wasn’t the characters he played, then Seungcheol wasn’t the photos he took.)

“You say ‘all those years’ like I’ve ever stopped loving your work.”

Something shook in Seungcheol’s gaze.

“Do you have a favourite piece?”

“I’m going to sound stupid, but your _sins not tragedies_ editorial changed my world.”

There was an unidentifiable difference in Seungcheol’s smile from the ones he’d been offering before. “I’m glad. Hearing that even one person appreciated it is enough for me.”

Jeonghan tried another fake laugh. “I don’t know that my love is enough.”

He had to wonder if Seungcheol still remembered, if his reference was flying right over his head or hitting him right in the face.

One look at the expression on Seungcheol’s face was enough to tell Jeonghan that the other man definitely still remembered. He looked exactly like someone had slapped him with a glove and he was trying his hardest to regulate his expression, which wasn’t far off from what had actually happened.

“Anyway,” he said, turning away from Seungcheol and back to Jessica. “What were we talking about?”

To Jessica Jung’s credit, she refrained from asking any questions about what had just transpired, despite the clear curiosity that she wasn’t bothering to conceal.

“How many items of clothing you’ll need from Blanc & Eclare,” Jessica said, leaning back in her chair. She exuded collected confidence, the kind of aura and charisma you expected from a CEO and decade-long veteran of the entertainment industry. Despite his own long history in the industry, Jeonghan suddenly felt like a little kid who wanted to grow up to become just like his idols.

“I’m in.”

* * *

“What the hell was that,” Seungcheol said once they left the building, intonation completely flat.

“What the hell was what?” Jeonghan asked, looking down the street impatiently. He had taken a taxi to the building, knowing how hard it was to find parking in this mess of a metropolis, and now it seemed there wasn’t one to be found in the vicinity.

God, sometimes he hated Seoul.

“Your whole ‘my love isn’t enough’ and ‘I’ve never stopped loving your work’ thing.”

Seungcheol was looking right at Jeonghan, arms crossed. Jeonghan was still pretending he was looking for a taxi that was never going to show up and whom he would have to tip a shit ton anyway just so that the driver wouldn’t spread the news of him taking a taxi all over social media.

“It was honesty,” Jeonghan replied. “I’ve always loved your work, Seungcheol.”

“Please, nobody could have loved my work in our first year of university.”

Jeonghan turned to face Seungcheol directly. “I’ve always loved your work,” he repeated, and then, a little lighter, he said, “even back then.”

“Did you mean it,” Seungcheol asked, shoving his hands into his pockets and looking uncharacteristically tentative, “when you said that editorial changed your world?”

“Yes.”

Seungcheol sighed and watched his breath coalesce into a cloud and float away. “I was thinking about you when I worked on it, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

(How was it possible that someone as mundane as Jeonghan could have inspired a work of art like that editorial?)

Seungcheol laughed a little. It sounded anything but happy. “The whole time I kept wondering how you would react. Because it was pretty much aimed at you, if you think about it.” A pause. “Or, you from seven years ago.”

Jeonghan was quiet for a little while. The wind whistled past them and down the open road as cars flew by. His tongue darted out to wet his lips once, then twice as he considered what Seungcheol had just said to him.

“So it was a letter to twenty-five-year-old me,” he said. “Telling me that I should open my fucking eyes.”

“Not quite as blunt, but sure.”

Seungcheol was smiling at Jeonghan the exact same way he used to all those years ago; like he couldn’t quite believe Jeonghan was real, like he couldn’t believe his own luck, like he held an infinite pot of fondness and patience from which he dipped into every time Jeonghan did anything.

“Jeonghan,” Seungcheol said, and the word was the softest it had been in anyone’s mouth for a long time.

It sounded too much like what they had had before; love, but also a manipulative, toxic relationship that imploded on itself. The way Seungcheol said his name was dangerous. It could make Jeonghan forget about the mistakes he’d made before. It could inspire him to make those mistakes all over again, like the special kind of idiot that he probably was, deep down inside.

See, seven years apparently had done nothing to erase Jeonghan’s knowledge of Choi Seungcheol, because the way that the other man had just said Jeonghan’s name was too soft, too intimate, for what they were now.

Jeonghan wasn’t twenty-five anymore. He was no longer that young, or that stupid, or even a fashion model. The Yoon Jeonghan of seven years ago might as well be a distantly related stranger to the one standing here today.

Who was Seungcheol to smile at him like that when he didn’t even know who Jeonghan was anymore? Did he know anything about Jeonghan, these days?

“No,” he said, the sudden sharpness of it slicing right through whatever the two of them had just had.

“What?”

“We can’t do this here.”

“You mean, talk?” Seungcheol asked, and there was the man that Jeonghan had fallen in love with all those years ago, a little bit sharp but always better than Jeonghan, unfailingly honest and loyal. Seungcheol, like Jisoo, called out Jeonghan’s bullshit, for the most part. That was hard to find.

Jeonghan realized abruptly that he must seem pretty stupid, and maybe he had misread everything coming from the other man and had jeopardized something he had only recently found.

“You can’t say my name like that, Seungcheol.”

“Why?” Seungcheol said, brows furrowed. He still hadn’t caught on.

“I --” Jeonghan started, then stopped. “I might get the wrong idea,” he said, all in a rush, and then finally caught sight of a taxi.

“Oh, well, I see a taxi coming along,” Jeonghan said, taking a step off the curb to hail his saving grace. “I’m just going to, uh, take that.”

The taxi pulled up next to him, and without even looking at it, Jeonghan pulled open the door to the back, threw himself into it, and closed it behind him. He waved at Seungcheol’s confused face as the driver pulled away.

“Yoon Jeonghan?” the driver said, glancing in his rearview mirror. “I loved your last movie.”

A few moments later, an incoming text appeared on his phone. It was from Seungcheol.

 **Seungcheol:** not going to talk about it, huh

 **Seungcheol:** guess you haven’t changed as much as i thought

Jeonghan sighed and threw the thing on his thigh, face down. He would really rather not think about that right now.

* * *

It took a few hours for him to work up the nerve and emotional energy to write back.

 **Jeonghan:** okay, that’s not fair

 **Seungcheol:** how

 **Jeonghan:** ...you don’t have to sound so accusatory

 **Seungcheol:** i can literally picture your pout rn

That sudden feeling of being known so well slapped Jeonghan across the face. How long had it been? How was it that Seungcheol could still understand him and his habits so well? Seven years, and in the end, when they were finally inexorably pulled back together by fate or the red string tied around their pinkies or the Earth’s magnetic field or whatever destiny you subscribed to, they picked up not exactly where they left off, but somewhere just a little after that.

Belatedly, he realized that he was indeed still pouting.

 **Jeonghan:** damn, you caught me

 **Jeonghan:** so, what are you doing right now

 **Seungcheol:** besides talking to you?

 **Jeonghan:** of course

 **Seungcheol:** watching a drama and drinking some wine

 **Seungcheol:** god, that makes me sound old and lonely doesn’t it

 **Jeonghan:** hey i’m drinking wine too

 **Jeonghan:** we can be old and lonely together

 **Seungcheol:** they let you do that?

 **Jeonghan:** i’m the one giving myself permission to do things these days

 **Jeonghan:** not them

There was a long moment without a reply. Jeonghan suddenly realized that read receipts weren’t on anymore. Long, long ago, when they had still been their unique brand of together, they both had read receipts on for the other.

It seemed that they had both turned it off sometime in the time that passed in between then and now.

 **Seungcheol:** good

 **Seungcheol:** i’m glad

Perhaps the worst part about making what was effectively textual small talk with someone you used to (still do) love was that Jeonghan could hear and see how Seungcheol would say his messages with unerring accuracy.

For example, those last two texts? It would have been said in a halting sort of tone, with a strange look in Seungcheol’s eyes that was probably a little bit bitter. After all, when they had been together the main reason it had all ended was Jeonghan’s career and his inability to reconcile that with being in love with a man. The sheer amount of control that his agency and his industry had had and still had over him was immense, and probably mind-bogglingly invasive to someone who wasn’t the product of the entertainment industry like he was.

Not even Seungcheol could fully understand. Jeonghan was a product that the industry sold. Seungcheol was the one creating it.

Jeonghan nearly tipped the contents of his wine glass down his throat all in one go, the way he usually did when he had alcohol convenient and too many thoughts running around in his head. As he reached for it, though, Jisoo’s words rang out in his head again.

_Alcohol as a coping mechanism is anything but healthy._

Jeonghan from seven years ago probably would have ignored that sound statement and drank the wine away. This Jeonghan stood up and dumped the contents of his wine glass down the sink instead.

(Was this what they called self-care?)

 **Jeonghan:** is the drama any good

 **Jeonghan:** what is it

 **Seungcheol:** a police drama

 **Jeonghan:** not a rom-com?

 **Seungcheol:** surprisingly, no

 **Seungcheol:** it’s pretty good so far

 **Seungcheol:** the male lead is killing it

 **Jeonghan:** i bet mine is better

 **Seungcheol:**...it is yours, actually

Oh. _Oh._ Jeonghan’s thumbs paused over his smartphone keyboard, an uncontrollable heat rushing up his throat and into his cheeks. There was an electric, tingling feeling in between his ribs, and suddenly all the love songs in the world snapped into place again.

So this was what iKon had meant in Love Scenario. So this was what the rookie girl groups and the senior boy groups, the soloists and the ballad singers, had meant in their music.

Suddenly, Jeonghan’s phone vibrated with an incoming call. It was from Seungcheol. Slowly, his thumb pressed the green button almost of his own accord and he lifted the phone to his ear.

“Seungcheol?”

“You still have the same number.”

There was something slightly off in Seungcheol’s voice, but Jeonghan couldn’t quite tell what. “What?” he said.

“Your phone number. You haven’t changed it in seven years.”

“So do you,” Jeonghan replied, voice softened. He knew what it was now. It was the wine, rounding Seungcheol’s vowels and creating an elision between some of his words, in that familiar Seungcheol way.

“I thought you deleted me from your phone,” Seungcheol said.

“I considered it,” Jeonghan said, trying his hardest to be wry. “But I could never bring myself to do it. Why haven’t you deleted me?”

A shaky laugh escaped Seungcheol. “How could I?”

Jeonghan’s heart stuttered like a teenage fool.

“I always thought you moved on long ago,” Jeonghan said, quiet. “Jisoo kept telling me that wasn’t the case, but I never really believed her.”

“Why not?”

There was something in Seungcheol’s voice that never changed. Jeonghan didn’t quite know what it was; whether it was the tone or the way he pronounced his words with the slightest Daegu lilt or maybe just the ineffable essence of his once best friend, but whatever it was, it made Jeonghan feel twenty-five again, blissfully unaware of how fucking stupid he was, thinking he was so worldly when in reality he had still been a kid who was allowed to drink and smoke.

To be quite honest, Jeonghan still felt like he wasn’t far off from that kid.

“I guess because it was you who wanted to end it,” Jeonghan admitted, “and because it’s been such a long time and it seems like you’ve moved on. And I’ve never been all that good at thinking people want to be around me.”

With the distance of seven years, Jeonghan could now say he partially understood what he had been doing back then. Twenty-five-year-old Yoon Jeonghan had been fucking terrified of people leaving him, but at the same time, he had believed fervently that everybody would end up leaving him, and so conversely, he had tried his hardest, consciously or unconsciously, to make his imagined nightmares reality.

Now that he thought about it, he had had some major problems at the time. And he had thought he was all grown up.

It would be laughable, except that version of himself had hurt the people around him, had destroyed friendships with Jihoon and Soonyoung and Seungcheol, had taken something sexual and almost-romantic and torn it down. And there was nothing funny about that.

He’d seen people who had broken up laugh about their pasts with each other. He and Jisoo would occasionally bring up that one time he’d kissed her when they first met and fall over themselves laughing about it. But he didn’t know that what he had had with Seungcheol would ever gain that status, as a sort of youthful indiscretion, yet another bad decision fuelled by some kind of legal drug in his twenties.

“So that’s what it was,” Seungcheol said, seemingly more to himself than to Jeonghan. “You never thought anybody wanted to be around you.”

“Didn’t Jihoon say anything?” Jeonghan replied, surprised. “I seem to recall having a minor mental breakdown at his place once about this topic.”

“Jihoon’s not like that,” Seungcheol said, suddenly slightly more sober and a lot more defensive.

Jeonghan shrugged. “To be honest, he never really liked me. I think he considered it sort of a ‘good riddance’ kind of thing when I disappeared from his life.”

“Regardless, he wouldn’t just spill something like that to me.”

Jeonghan conceded the point. He wasn’t about to argue with Seungcheol over this, not when the other man was more than likely a little bit tipsy.

“Well, anyway,” Jeonghan said, eager to get away from his insecurities and issues he’d carried as a twenty-something, “what do you think of my drama?”

“I’m on the second episode. Right now you’re interrogating someone with your dress shirt sleeves rolled up. It’s a good look on you, you should tell your stylists that.”

Jeonghan laughed softly. “I’m sure noona will be glad to hear you appreciate the way I look when my forearms are exposed.”

“Forearms are like,” Seungcheol said, sounding like he was thinking out loud, “really hot.”

“How profound.”

This was so rare for them – for Jeonghan to be the sober one and Seungcheol the one in possession of less of his wits. Starting from their university days, Jeonghan had always been the hot mess; forgetting to hand in assignments, making procrastination a full-time job, getting drunk off his ass at parties. Seungcheol had been the one to remind him about his assignments, make him do his work, and drag his drunken body back to their dorm. In all their years as best friends that fucked, Jeonghan had rarely ever seen Seungcheol drunk while he himself was sober.

To be fair, Seungcheol wasn’t drunk right now either, but he was definitely closer to it than Jeonghan had clear memories of seeing.

“You’re yelling at the suspect now,” Seungcheol commented. “That’s less hot.”

Jeonghan laughed. “I guess I’ll keep that in mind?”

“You sound happy,” Seungcheol commented.

“While yelling at the suspect?” Jeonghan asked.

“No, I mean you in real life.”

Jeonghan didn’t answer for a few moments. “Why do you say that?”

“You laugh. You look back on things and understand how and why they happened. You just seem...I don’t know. Like you’re more at peace.”

“I guess I am,” Jeonghan admitted. “I mean, we’re thirty-two. We’re not kids anymore. I finally grew up.”

“I think I finished doing that a while back.”

The two of them lapsed into a surprisingly comfortable silence for a while. Jeonghan sat there on his couch and listened to the background noise of the wind outside his windows and his own voice coming from Seungcheol’s TV and his ex’s steady breathing and occasional sips of wine.

It was nice. It was the most intimate he’d been with Seungcheol in a long, long time, and he hadn’t realized he’d missed it so much.

(It was so, so easy to do this and fall into the trap of imagining a future for him and Seungcheol. To make himself believe that this sort of casual conversation on the couch was possible for them. To create a world in his head where they were together, and happy, and in love. But in the end, it was still a trap. The Korea of seven years ago was not so different from the Korea they lived in now, and it was the same in all the ways that mattered.)

“So, what do you think of Jessica?” Jeonghan finally asked. “Was she everything you wanted her to be?”

“I know they say not to meet your heroes,” Seungcheol said, laughing a little, “but I definitely don’t regret meeting her. She’s so _cool._ ”

“She’s not even that much older than us, when you think about it,” Jeonghan mused out loud. “And yet she’s still ten thousand times more successful and cooler than we are.”

“Well,” Seungcheol said, a little wry, “you might be famous actor Yoon Jeonghan, but you’ll never be Girls’ Generation level.”

“I, for one, welcome our girl group overlords.”

“You’d try to fuck them,” Seungcheol snorted.

“I’m not on their level,” Jeonghan said dismissively, smarting a little from the tossed-off remark. “And I don’t like girls anyway.”

There was a long, long silence this time.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I don’t like girls,” Jeonghan replied, saying it like it was mundane and obvious. “I’m gay, Seungcheol.”

“You’re _what?_ ” Seungcheol said, seemingly shocked into sobriety by the mere admission of Jeonghan’s sexuality. “Since when have you been so self-aware?”

“Please, I’m not the same as I was seven years ago,” he said. “Didn’t I just tell you that I’ve grown up?”

“But you’re not out,” Seungcheol said, heavy.

“Yeah, well, we can’t all be trailblazers like you,” Jeonghan replied, suddenly weary. Why was it that he carried all these expectations? Was he a fake gay just because he preferred to keep his sexuality hidden from the hostile world that awaited it? Was Seungcheol more valid than he was for being less of a liar in a position where it was much, much easier to be honest?

Jisoo or someone else might accuse him of being ashamed. This hypothetical (almost definitely straight) person would point a finger at him and say that he had internalized homophobia or some shit because he knew his industry so well and didn’t want its wrath. That because Jeonghan was realistic enough to understand what would become of him if he came out, he was ashamed of his own identity.

In the end, that was what it always was, wasn’t it? Him or Seungcheol. His livelihood or his love.

Last time, it had been his career.

Jeonghan wouldn’t speculate on what it would be this time.

“Is that what you think?” Seungcheol asked, voice quieter and much less carefree than it had been before when they were commenting on how Jeonghan looked when his forearms were exposed. “That what I did was something special?”

“Of course it was,” Jeonghan replied. “Even though it was from a position where it was more easily accepted, it’s still not easy or normal for anyone in our industry to come out.”

“It really didn’t feel that way,” he sighed. “It just felt honest. Right. Like it was what I should have been doing.”

“I don’t know that we can all have that privilege, Seungcheol.”

“Why is being honest about who you are a privilege?”

Jeonghan laughed, the taste of it bitter and acrid in his throat. “Don’t ask me, ask the general populace of this godforsaken peninsula.”

Seungcheol, bless his soul, did not hang up immediately like a normal person would at this sudden burst of emotion, and replied, “If it’s godforsaken, why come back every time?”

“Because I am too.”

Long silence, and then, “what the hell do you expect me to say to that?”

“Nothing. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on in the drama?”

Seungcheol sighed, and Jeonghan heard the sound of someone shifting around vaguely through his cellphone. “You’re doing that thing where you pretend you don’t care about the female lead but actually you’re doing something nice for her secretly. Right now you’re calling her stupid for being unable to use the photocopier while photocopying the documents for her.”

Jeonghan laughed. “I remember that scene. The first time we filmed it I actually broke the photocopier.”

“I’m sure the director was very happy about that.”

“They fixed it pretty quickly,” Jeonghan shrugged. “No big deal.” It had been one of the few instances where his notoriously put-together co-star, Joohyun-noona, had broken character and laughed. Jeonghan had told this story quite a few times, mainly on variety shows as the cast of the show went on the promotion circuit.

“Yeah,” Seungcheol said, inane. “I guess a big drama shoot like yours had a backup or something.”

The two of them sat there and sat and then sat some more. Jeonghan craned his head over the back of his couch to look out the window and stare at the little pinpricks of light that were the other similarly lonely, similarly messy, similarly young people sitting in their own little apartments, looking out at the rest of the city.

“Seungcheol,” Jeonghan said suddenly, “I have something to say.”

“Hm?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For me?” Jeonghan said, free hand making a strange motion in the air as he tried to explain himself. “For who I was when I was young and twenty and super super gay but too stupid to see it. I’m sorry that that version of me hurt you and made you waste years of your life with him.”

“Hey,” Seungcheol said, “nobody made anyone do anything. I wanted to stay with you.”

“That’s not what happened,” Jeonghan protested. “I was a manipulative little bitch. Maybe you did want to stay with me to some degree, but that doesn’t change that I was the one being shitty in that relationship.”

“...I’m glad you know that.”

“Yeah,” Jeonghan said. “Yeah. It, uh, it took a while. But I meant it when I said I grew up.”

“Thank you for apologizing,” Seungcheol said, and Jeonghan could picture the other man sitting on the other end of the couch, running a hand through his hair like he always did when he was on the spot and had to think of something to say.

Jeonghan had the sudden, overwhelming urge to cry a little; the mirage of Choi Seungcheol on this couch was so vivid, so real, probably because it had happened so many times before. He could see Seungcheol in his sweatpants and his old, faded university T-shirt, hair just washed and dripping little drops of water onto the nape of his neck.

There was so much longing welling up behind his eyes and in his throat that he thought he would choke on it.

“I miss you,” Jeonghan said, the words slipping out of his mouth before he could even think to stop himself. “I miss being able to talk to you like this.”

“How did we decide to just stop talking to each other again?” Seungcheol asked, sounding genuinely bemused.

“I tried to talk to you,” Jeonghan responded. “But it hurt too much. For me and for you. So I stopped trying.”

“...do you want to start again?”

“Start what?” Jeonghan asked, and he could hear his heart pounding in his ears.

“Trying. I miss having you around too, you know.”

“How did Jisoo convince you to let me work on the show?” he asked suddenly.

“She didn’t really need to. Remember how I said I want you?”

A chill ran down Jeonghan’s spine, despite the innocent meaning of the words and the relatively non-sexual context.

“Yes.”

“I mean it.”

“I’m glad.”

* * *

Work on the fashion show progressed quickly after that; Jessica Jung’s problem had never been lack of industry interest, after all, and Jeonghan’s name was a big draw as well. He and Seungcheol spent a lot of time together with various designers, courting them, taking them out to dinner and lunch and after-work drinks, trying to catch up with them after shows or between meetings with other, presumably more important people.

In all that time spent together, the days turning into weeks turning into months, it was impossible for Jeonghan not to notice little things about Seungcheol.

Things like the way he furrowed his eyebrows when he was listening intently to someone else’s words. How he bit his lip when he was typing up important emails and proofreading them, because of course perfectionist Choi Seungcheol, who spent twice the amount of hours editing his photos compared to his peers, would proofread all his emails multiple times. How Seungcheol still hit the bottom of his soju bottles with his elbow instead of the palm of his hand like Jeonghan did, how he ignored avocados like the plague, how he’d try any flavour of chips but refused to let anyone mess with the sanctity of his fries; it was all absolutely endearing to Jeonghan.

So this was what it felt like to fall in love again, and to do it right.

Before, Jeonghan had been terrified of his own heart, his own feelings; he had been in his early twenties, at the peak of his career as a model, and there hadn’t been any room for anything less than heterosexuality in his life. Somehow, he’d still managed to have a considerable amount of non-heterosexual sex with Seungcheol and reconcile that with his worldview, but nobody had ever said Jeonghan wasn’t delusional.

Jisoo had been calling him out on it for ages, after all.

Now, though, Jeonghan was fully aware of himself and who he was. He knew that the fluttering in his heart and the fondness in his gaze whenever he looked at Seungcheol were signs of love. And he was here for it, although still a little scared.

Because here was the thing. What was he supposed to _do_ about this?

Luckily (or very, very unluckily) for Jeonghan, his alter ego would take over that responsibility for him.

Tipsy Jeonghan. Tipsy Jeonghan ruined everything.

To destress, Seungcheol and Jeonghan had taken to going out together after working on whatever show-related business they had had; whether that was finding a barbecue place or ordering takeout or just getting late-night drinks, they always did something.

Tonight, they had just finished a long casting session with a series of models that had all blurred together. Honestly, it had been strange for Jeonghan to be on the other side of that table, to be the one smiling and shaking hands from a seat, to be the one writing inscrutable notes down that determined a person’s career.

Not that a charity fashion show was career-making, but it was a start, and entertainment was saturated as fuck. Any show that involved big names like Choi Seungcheol or Jessica Jung was everything to most models.

(Not that Jeonghan could quite remember what that was like, anymore; the hazy sands of time blurred most things from that period of his life besides Seungcheol, and there was also the salient point of his career being basically a very fast elevator to the top. Such was the nature of the industry. People were randomly plucked out of obscurity and placed on the highest pedestal of all, and even they didn’t quite know how they had ended up there.)

Point was, they found a little bar in the middle of nowhere and got bottles of soju and plenty of food to go with it. About two or three drinks in, the two of them got to an uncomfortably honest point, yet again.

That was a pattern with them. Get them a little loose, a little tipsy, and words would just come spilling out. Some of those words were sentiments that Sober Jeonghan would probably much rather stayed inside of him.

Unfortunately for Sober Jeonghan, that shit never went well.

They had been fine. They were trying, again; they just sat there, with their takeout and their soju, in Jeonghan’s car, and chatted away like old times. Jeonghan sat in the driver’s seat, Seungcheol occasionally flicking at the switch for the windows. They touched on simple, safe subjects, like Jisoo, or Jessica, or the justice and injustice of their industry and the way it pulled some people out of the mud and kicked the rest in the face.

Normal stuff, for the two of them. But nothing too personal. Until he opened his mouth and let the soju control him instead of his brain.

“Do you remember,” Jeonghan asked, tilting his head so he could see the different ways his soju caught the light, “that day in my apartment? When you said you didn’t know if you would still be waiting for me?”

Jeonghan didn’t look up to see what Seungcheol’s reaction was, but he heard a crumpled, “yes.”

“So,” Jeonghan continued, “are you still waiting?”

“...why?”

“Because I am.”

“I,” Seungcheol started, then stopped. “Jeonghan,” he began again. “Can I tell you what it was like after I ended it?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, in that slightly drunken Seungcheol way that Jeonghan loved.

“That breakup _broke_ me,” he said, looking out the window, soju bottle in hand, rather than looking directly at Jeonghan, like it was too much for eye contact. “Living in that tiny apartment with so many memories of you, seeing your face on all those billboards and magazines, hearing your voice on TV or catching a glimpse of you at a fashion show; it was like being stabbed. I saw you kiss a girl backstage once. That wasn’t long after we broke up.”

“A year,” Jeonghan said, almost silently. “A year after. Her eyes looked like yours.”

Seungcheol stopped, seemingly shaken, but then continued. “Seeing that made me feel like I was being suffocated. I worked my ass off to get out of that apartment, you know. So I guess I should thank you for that.” A bitter, empty laugh. “I couldn’t bear just going about my daily life in what felt like a memorial to our past.”

Seungcheol took in a deep, dragging breath. It sounded like he was trying to scrape his insides out. “But I moved out. And I moved on. Seven years passed, and I thought I didn’t care anymore. Then you walked back into my life and it turned out I did.”

Jeonghan’s breath had caught on something in his throat that felt suspiciously like terror and couldn’t move.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“You know what?” Seungcheol said, some kind of liquid courage seemingly infusing him as he turned to look Jeonghan in the eyes.

He waited for the other shoe to drop. It didn’t. Jeonghan furrowed his eyebrows and finally, tentatively, asked, “What?”

Instead of an answer, Jeonghan got Seungcheol’s lips meeting his. It was an impressively chaste kiss, considering who the two of them were and how long it had been since they’d last done this with each other (seven years and nine months, not that he was counting) and how much soju they’d consumed.

Going off of past experience, the longer they stayed apart from each other, the harder they crashed back together. But this was tentative, testing, treading carefully because they had both been bitten by this particular relationship before.

It was intoxicating, and it seemed that everything they had before fell back into place with the slightest of thuds in the back of his head.

When they pulled apart, Jeonghan was dizzy.

“Seungcheol,” he said, quiet, fully aware of just how cinematic this moment was, two famous men with a long history sitting in a car together and kissing, talking in whispers and memories, “did you mean that?”

“Which part?”

“The kiss. That you still cared. All of it, basically.”

Seungcheol laughed, soft and sweet. “Yes. Yes, Jeonghan, I meant it.”

“So...what do we do now? And can we maybe not have this conversation over takeout and soju inside my car?” Jeonghan said, nose wrinkled. “This is going to be all over the papers if we stay here much longer.”

“You’re in a car, Jeonghan,” Seungcheol deadpanned. “Just fucking drive.”

“Okay, okay,” Jeonghan grumbled, but there was something warm and familiar about it that seemed to light him up from the inside out.

* * *

“This won’t work,” Jeonghan said, dropping his head into his hands. His fingers tightened in his meticulously styled hair, frustrated. “God, we both know this won’t work.”

“Why not?” Seungcheol replied, challenging. The soju had mostly worn off (and thankfully, they hadn’t been caught drinking and driving, because _that_ was a scandal Jeonghan was not prepared to deal with), and the two of them were antagonizing each other like the worst kind of siblings. Seungcheol was perched on the other end of Jeonghan’s couch, just like he had visualized all those months ago, during that slightly tipsy phone call.

“I know this country!” he said. “Unfortunately. And there’s no fucking way it’ll just allow me to be something it doesn’t want.”

“It’s a better world out there, Jeonghan,” Seungcheol said, arms crossed. “It’s been seven years.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t believe in better worlds. I only believe in this one.”

“Why are you like this?”

Jeonghan threw up his hands and leaned back against the couch. “I don’t know, Seungcheol. Maybe because I’ve seen people’s careers ruined for less? Look at Jessica. She left SM on bad terms and now she can’t promote on music shows or go on mainstream TV.”

“She’s doing what she loves, though,” Seungcheol replied, voice quieter now. “She has her business. She has her boyfriend. And she can still produce solo music on her own terms, without anyone in charge of her. She has it all.”

Jeonghan raised an eyebrow. “There’s no such thing as having it all and we both know it. Jessica can’t even publicly interact with her music industry peers.”

“Is it so terrible, to give up something for love?” Seungcheol finally asked.

“You can’t eat love. You can’t drink it. Love doesn’t buy heat for the winter or a roof over your head.”

Seungcheol laughed. “You have the kind of money that protects you from that. You’re far from those kinds of considerations.”

“Not the kind of lifestyle,” Jeonghan replied.

Seungcheol levelled an assessing look at Jeonghan. “I don’t think that’s why you don’t want to do this,” he said. “I think you’re scared.”

“Maybe I am,” Jeonghan said. “Maybe I’m scared of losing my livelihood and my career and my colleagues. Maybe, Seungcheol, the idea of turning into the next Hong Seokcheon and getting fired from all my work and then having to lie low for another decade is too much for me. Who can blame me for that? Any other entertainer would be fucking terrified too.”

“Hong Seokcheon made a new life for himself,” Seungcheol countered. “He’s still rich. He still appears on TV --”

“But will he ever get it back?” Jeonghan asked. “No. He’ll never be mainstream again.”

“Jeonghan --” Seungcheol began, but Jeonghan stood in a fit of nervous energy and walked over to the kitchen.

“Snacks?”

“No, I’m good,” Seungcheol replied, and Jeonghan could feel the other man’s slightly bewildered gaze tracing his back and possibly his butt. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Jeonghan said, but his voice came out too high. “Okay, no,” he admitted as he felt Seungcheol’s gaze change from bewildered to disbelieving. “I’m not. I’m scared and nervous and there’s too much adrenaline inside me. I feel like I should be shaking. I need to smoke.”

“It’s your apartment,” Seungcheol shrugged. “Don’t let me stop you.”

It was winter. By all accounts, the windows should have been frozen shut. Jeonghan managed to crack one open a little bit anyway, after a few moments of tense effort, and lit up gratefully. One inhale and the sheer amount of energy flowing through his veins suddenly dialled back down to a manageable level.

“You know, Seungcheol,” Jeonghan said suddenly, “I never got over you.”

“What?”

“You made that whole speech about what it was like after we broke up. But you moved on, right? You did your time in Itaewon. You hooked up with the random men in all those bars. I never got to that point.”

Jeonghan blew a cloud of smoke out the window and inhaled on his death stick again. “Remember those movies we watched together? Those rom-coms you loved in university. I still have them. They’re behind the TV.”

“After all these years?”

Jeonghan couldn’t resist a little laugh at the reference in a moment of such seriousness. “Always. Now let me have my male-lead-in-a-drama moment.”

He heard the sound of Seungcheol sitting at his kitchen table as he looked out the window.

“I was so desperate for a piece of you after it ended that I just sat on the floor with your clothes when I found them.”

“Why did you give them back, then?”

“I thought you’d want them. And I thought it would be better to make it a clean cut. I internet-stalked you, you know. I kept up with all your work. Read all your interviews, including the one where you denied even knowing me in university.”

“I mean, you understand why I did it, right?”

“Yes. I would have done the same. Jisoo cut it out and showed it to me. I’m pretty sure I set it on fire.”

A soft laugh left Seungcheol. “You’re really something.”

“I made a collage of your photos.”

“You what?”

“I have a million photos of you, right? I printed them out and put them up on a corkboard once. I don’t know where it is now. It hurt to look at so I took it down pretty quickly.”

“We’re both idiots, aren’t we?” Seungcheol asked. “Me for thinking that we can make it work. You for thinking we can’t.”

“You’re so optimistic, it makes my head hurt, really.” Jeonghan tapped his cigarette against the window ledge, watched the glowing ember reveal itself from underneath all the grey ash that had tumbled down towards the road beneath.

He wondered, would it land on someone? Leave them stained with a little piece of Yoon Jeonghan’s cigarette, leave behind that indelible smell that cigarettes always carried? The smoke always clung to his hair; he carried around a little bottle of dry shampoo at all times partially because of it. It was also because he was a busy man who didn’t have time to shower, but mostly because of his terrible smoking habit.

“I could say the same about you and your pessimism.”

“Realism,” Jeonghan corrected immediately, and then laughed a little. “We sound so domestic right now.”

“All that’s left is for me to scold you for smoking, huh?”

Jeonghan blew out a ring of smoke. “Yeah.”

He stood there for a long moment. Was this their future? Driving around under the cover of night, hiding their relationship? No. There wasn’t a chance. Seungcheol was an open book, fondness and affection always written in the curl of his mouth or the slant of his eyes. It wouldn’t take Dispatch’s stalker reporters to see their relationship. Netizens would see it in a half-second. They couldn’t hide it.

So then, what was his future? What Hong Seokcheon had had? Exile from the industry, pivoting into celebrity restaurants and cafés?

(He had imagined a café as his career in retirement. He hadn’t meant for it to be so soon.)

And what then, after he had given it all up for Choi Seungcheol? What would he do if or when they broke up and Jeonghan was left, dried up and hung out for the vultures to tear at? What strain would it put on the two of them if Jeonghan did come out and go public with their relationship and lost all his work? What kind of resentful hate would grow in the darkest corners of his heart then?

Jeonghan had seen too many relationships fail because of the weight of one person destroying another’s career. It often happened when dating scandals became known to the public; either one or both people’s careers imploded, the two of them tried to make it work, eventually began to blame the other, and then separated. Maybe the scandal and damage would have been worth it if the couple had stayed together. But they almost never did. So what was the point?

He didn’t know if he could live with himself if that happened to them; if the two of them fell back together and then apart like the worst reprise of their former relationship, if he and Seungcheol turned back into strangers and ghosts because they had tried again and failed desperately.

“I don’t think we can do this,” Jeonghan said, final.

“You’ve said that already.”

“Correction,” Jeonghan said, turning around as he threw the cigarette out the window, “I don’t think I can.”

“What can I say to convince you?”

Jeonghan sighed. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Can you please think about this?”

“That’s what I was doing just now.”

“Jeonghan, why are you so push-and-pull all the time?”

Jeonghan slowly and methodically cranked the handle until the window shut. There was something satisfying about the thud that it made when it sealed back into the side of the building, turning the edifice back into a sleek panel of money and power. Something about knowing that it had returned to its rightful place made his heart content.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that I can’t come out and have it ruin my career, for my sake and yours. If we decide to go public, I’ll lose everything. That’s going to put a strain on our relationship, to the point where it’ll break down. In the end, I’ll have neither career nor love. So what’s the point, if we’re going to end up like this again?”

“Again with the pessimism.”

“Realism,” Jeonghan echoed, mouth curved in a fond sort of smile. “I’m sorry Seungcheol, but I think you’ll have to leave.”

“Aren’t you worried people will see me leaving and rumours will spread?” Seungcheol asked, a little arch.

He deserved it. Jeonghan never had made things easy for Seungcheol. It was a miracle the man was as even-tempered as he was, unlike Jeonghan, who was only pretending to be calm all the time. On the inside, he was just a tangled mess of nicotine addiction and self-esteem issues and obsessions with his own image and thoughts about Seungcheol. Not to the same degree as he used to be, when he was in his twenties and all his problems had been magnified, but they were still present.

Jeonghan sighed. “A little, but you’ve never been caught before.”

“What do you mean?”

“You used to come over to my place on a relatively regular basis. Nobody ever caught you.”

Seungcheol paused, in the middle of taking his coat out from the closet. “I never thought of that.”

A little, bitter smile pulled at Jeonghan’s mouth. “I did.”

Seungcheol sighed, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. Jeonghan could hear the words as if the other man had said them out loud; _of course you did._

“See you tomorrow,” Seungcheol said, shrugging on his coat. “Bye, Jeonghan.”

“Bye.”

The door closed silently behind him. Jeonghan lit another cigarette.

* * *

“You fucking idiot,” Jisoo said, arms crossed and eyes set in that dangerous way of hers that meant Jeonghan was in for it now. “You’re dumb!”

“I think you said that one already.”

“You’re so fucking dumb.” Jisoo groaned, throwing her head back a little. She took a moment to collect yourself, then threw herself into the chair of her kitchen table. Jeonghan, who had been absently peeling a mandarin, only shifted his hands away a little bit and let her continue her rant.

This was Hong Jisoo on a regular basis when it came to Yoon Jeonghan and his dumbass decisions. He tolerated it; welcomed it, even, because Jisoo was invariably, always right. And he definitely needed someone around to hold him accountable the way she did.

Jeonghan got the peel off in one and silently offered a slice to her. Jisoo snatched it from him, popped it in her mouth, and began chewing on it angrily.

It was stupidly endearing and kind of funny, but Jeonghan doubted that Jisoo would appreciate hearing that right now, despite the white glow of her kitchen lights framing her in a way that was ripe for candid Polaroids or a photo album from college.

That was not what this was. It could have been, but when Jeonghan arrived at Jisoo’s apartment looking to have a relaxing night in, she instead launched into a scolding that was just a rant in disguise, having heard some part of the story from Seungcheol already.

Jeonghan assumed that it had made him look very bad, because the way Jisoo was carrying on, you’d think that Jeonghan had raped a girl group, murdered their manager, stolen all their stuff and hopped into a drug dealer minivan so he could run away with all of it. While selling illegal drugs. Like stacks upon stacks of horrendous crimes, not simply been realistic and disagreed with the view of the world that Seungcheol (and Jisoo, apparently) believed in.

“Do you ever stop to think about what you do?” Jisoo asked, totally serious.

Jeonghan paused in his peeling of a second mandarin, having let Jisoo take the other one. “Of course I do, I’m a grown-ass adult, Jisoo. And a celebrity. I can’t afford not to.”

In that respect, he had grown up remarkably quickly. There had been no other option at the time; while university students were still generally at that point of their lives where they sort of thought before they acted but didn’t really, Jeonghan had had to, because of a myriad of reasons; morality clauses, his own closeted sexuality, his public image, his agent.

Despite the amount of nostalgia he had for his university days, to be honest, he hadn’t been close friends with many people at all. It had just been Seungcheol, really.

(It had always been Seungcheol.)

Everyone else he knew at the time, like Soonyoung and Jihoon and this boy named Wonwoo that they drifted apart from after university, had been through Seungcheol or passing acquaintances. Jihoon had always been definitively on Seungcheol’s side; they were best friends, and Jeonghan had only become any kind of close with Jihoon out of necessity. Soonyoung was more of the same. As for Wonwoo, he had been a philosophy major that had taken some art history classes as an elective. He was an academic kind of person; last Jeonghan had heard, he had gone on to grad school, and at that point, they had been too different to really talk about anything together.

“But have you _really_ thought about this?” Jisoo asked, brows furrowed as she leaned forward to place her elbows on the table.

“Yeah. What did Seungcheol tell you?”

“A condensed version of your conversation. You think that if you two start dating and people find out you’ll lose all your work, grow to resent Seungcheol for it, and break up with him.”

Jeonghan stopped in his peeling to think about this summary for a moment. “Basically, yeah. But the crux of it is that I’ll be worse off than I started, so what’s the point?”

“You can’t just logic relationships like that!” Jisoo said, frustrated. Her nails accidentally dug into the mandarin too hard, squirting juice onto her pristine table. She looked down at it, frowned a little, then reached behind her to grab the tissue box off the kitchen island. She began to clean the juice slowly and methodically, scrubbing just a little too hard for the task at hand.

“That’s not a verb,” Jeonghan said under his breath.

“Heard that.”

Jeonghan ate his mandarin slowly and didn’t let the wince cross his face. There was something dangerous about Jisoo in moments like these, when the anger was slow and quiet and simmering right after it had exploded. He never knew where she was going to go; whether she would finish the calculations in her head, drop the topic for another time and forgive him, or keep going harder and harder, sure of herself, until he relented.

“Do you think that any part of what I predicted was wrong, though?” he asked, voice measured.

“Of course I do.”

“Which part was wrong? Enlighten me.”

There was too much attitude in his voice. His sass was nowhere near conducive to actually having a proper conversation with Jisoo, but then again, it wasn’t like she was trying all that hard to be calm and patient either.

(He had a sudden flashback to that day a few months ago, when Jisoo had told him how impossible it was to be calm and patient around him, and was suddenly more sympathetic.)

To her credit, Jisoo just glared at him and started talking instead of punching him in the face right then and there for acting like a surly fifteen-year-old.

“That you’ll lose all your work,” she began, and Jeonghan cut in to correct this huge misconception right away, because how could he let that stand?

“No, that’s the part we can _all_ agree on,” he argued. “Look at Hyuna and E’Dawn. They’re in a straight relationship and look at how that turned out for them. Or Jessica, whose crime was parting ways with an iconic group and company on ambiguous terms. Or Hong Seokcheon, who was gay and not even in a relationship at the time. What do you think will happen to me if I’m gay and in a relationship?”

“Or you could become the Ellen of a generation,” Jisoo pointed out. “You could keep most of your work, become a gay icon, and lead the queer community in Korea into the 21st century.”

“Which one do you think is more likely?” Jeonghan asked. “Be serious, not optimistic.”

Jisoo sighed. “A mix of both. You’ll lose some of your work, yes, but not all of it. Plenty of people will support you, and plenty of people will hate you. The positive people will probably outweigh the negative ones, but not by much. And in the end, I think you two can be happy.”

Jeonghan was quiet for a few moments. “I want us to be happy too,” he admitted. “But last time we broke up we broke each other. And if we go through all this and break up again, I’d be responsible for breaking Seungcheol’s heart twice. That’s not something I want.”

“Isn’t that his decision to make? He’s already told you that he wants to try again with you. He knows he might get his heart broken and he wants to do it anyway.”

“That’s why I told him that it wasn’t us who couldn’t do it. It was me. I can’t handle that.”

Jeonghan put the last piece of the mandarin in his mouth and reached for another. The pile of peels had been steadily growing as the two of them talked, the dead outer layer of skin forming a little mound on the table that one of them would have to grudgingly clean up later.

Jisoo sighed again. In the back of his mind, Jeonghan wondered what would happen to her if she eventually just sighed all her disappointment with him out. What would be left? It seemed these days that Jisoo was consumed by disappointment in him, by hopes she thrust upon his relationship with Seungcheol, by the desperate need to fix a man who had been broken for far too long for that to be possible.

She was possibly too much of a good Christian, if that was possible.

“So you can’t handle breaking up again,” she said. “Have you ever considered what it’ll be like for the rest of your life, knowing you had a chance at doing it right and didn’t take it?”

“What?”

“Do you really think that you, Yoon Jeonghan, the number one emo actor, can live the rest of your life without beating yourself up for not taking this chance?”

“...I’ll have to.”

“I’m telling you right now, as the person who will have to listen to the drunken rants and sobbing, that you won’t,” Jisoo replied, lips thinning into a straight line. She sat there for a little while, clearly thinking about something, and then opened her mouth to say, “Do you remember that guy I dated like two years ago?”

“You mean Connor, the male model from the States who moved to Korea to break into the quote-unquote Oriental market?”

Jisoo cringed. “Yes.”

“I wish I could forget.”

“So do I. Remember how I was after we broke up?”

Jeonghan nodded. “You told me you kind of saw it coming when you started dating him, so I asked you why bother dating him at all.”

“And I told you that I wanted to know. I wanted to know how it would end for sure, and I wanted to give it a chance, so that I wouldn’t regret not doing it years later.”

He could still recall those words. At the time, they hadn’t meant that much to him, but they had nestled in his memory and never left. They were stuck, because it seemed too much like something profound from a movie or a not-particularly-subtle novel that would be important for the plot later on.

Maybe it was the actor in him, but he kept track of random lines like that. And now he could see what Jisoo’s point was.

“Remember what you were like after you two broke up?”

“How could I forget,” Jeonghan said flatly.

“Imagine what it’ll be like watching him date other people publicly. Imagine him forgetting about you. Imagine every time you see him with his boyfriend of the month you wonder what it would be like if you were the one on his arm instead. Imagine how you’ll feel bumping into him at all these events and leaving with another man. Imagine what it’ll be like to work with him in the future or try to be friends. Imagine knowing that you did it to yourself, because you were too much of a fucking coward at age thirty-two to even try again with Seungcheol.”

Jeonghan had long since frozen in his peeling of the mandarins.

See, here was the thing. Jeonghan could easily picture that future for himself. He could see himself walking down that road, heart twisting in pain every time he made eye contact with Seungcheol and saw a different man by his side. He could see himself becoming more and more distant, being the one to slowly ghost Seungcheol into oblivion. Jeonghan could picture himself growing old, sad and lonely, while Seungcheol moved on again.

After all, he had done it before. It had been Jeonghan’s dedicated presence for many months that had pulled Seungcheol back into this particular circle of hell again. Jeonghan was the one who had never managed to get past that part of their lives. And one day, he’d find himself at age 40 or 50 and look around and suddenly realize that Seungcheol was happily married and settled down with a husband and maybe even kids, and Jeonghan would still be there, in his pristine apartment, still alone. Still surrounded by sad reminders of a past he could no longer have, like those goddamn movies and that collage tucked away at the back of his closet, behind all the clothes he didn’t wear but kept for fear he might want to wear them sometime.

And he’d know it was all his fault that he would never know how it might have been.

So as Jisoo wove the tapestry of that future into existence right before his eyes, Jeonghan was terrified. Could he live with that?

If he was going to be truly honest with himself (which he should), he already knew the answer. There was no way in hell he’d ever be able to live knowing that he and Seungcheol could have been happy together.

So maybe they were going to break up. So maybe they were doomed to destroy themselves and each other. So South Korea didn’t want them, so fucking what?

No. That was too much. Jeonghan wasn’t sure he could just give up on caring about his image and the society around them just yet. But it was a nice sentiment, and the spirit of the message was what mattered.

“And you know what else?” Jisoo continued. “Your obsession with image doesn’t even matter in the end. What do you think is going to happen to you once you really do become too old or unpopular for the industry?”

“I’ll figure it out. I always have.”

“This is a fickle, fickle industry that we chose for ourselves, Jeonghan,” Jisoo said, shaking her head. “Once it’s really, truly done with you, it’s going to grind you into the dust and leave you broken. Why not carve some happiness out for yourself?”

...why not?

“You know what, Jisoo?” Jeonghan asked, standing suddenly. “I’m just going to leave now.”

“Why?” Jisoo asked, a satisfied smile curling its way across her face as she realized she’d gotten her prize. “Did you just realize I was right and become too embarrassed to admit it?”

“Yes,” he grumbled. “Now let me keep my dignity as I leave.”

“Didn’t know you had any of that,” she quipped as she held the door for him. “You know, only the truth will set you free.”

“Okay, okay, I get the idea,” he grumbled.

“See you around, Jeonghan.”

His mouth softened at the sight of her.

“See you, Jisoo,” he said, dropping a kiss on her head, and left.

* * *

“I’m sorry.”

“This is getting to be a pattern,” Seungcheol said, raising an eyebrow. “Why are you apologizing to me this time?”

“For being stupid.”

Seungcheol smiled. “That doesn’t mean much to me, now does it? That could refer to about ten different situations within the past week.”

Jeonghan threw a piece of popcorn at Seungcheol, who was sitting on the opposite side of his kitchen table, reviewing documents for the show. Jeonghan was shuffling through the final models and deciding the order of who was wearing what and when they would walk, while Seungcheol figured out what the runway was going to look like.

It was nice. It was domestic, the papers spread out across the glass table, the easy conversation as they commented on this diagram or that design, the occasional glances at their phone and sharing of texts or news headlines. Jeonghan hadn’t felt this content in a long time.

Whenever their feet touched under the table, it felt like an electric current. That was less domestic contentedness and a lot more heart-fluttering spasms, but Jeonghan could work with that too.

(They hadn’t kissed since that night in the car with the soju and takeout. Jeonghan took it as a good sign. They weren’t the same anymore.)

“I’m sorry for pretending I was being realistic to hide that I was terrified of taking a chance on us,” Jeonghan said, putting down his papers to look directly at Seungcheol. “I’m sorry that I made you think that I was buying into our relationship as much as you were when I was still holding back. And I’m sorry for being so goddamn depressing.”

Seungcheol looked at Jeonghan without saying for a long, long moment. Finally, he said, “What?”

“Jisoo and I talked.”

“Our lord and saviour.”

“And I realized,” Jeonghan continued, “that I would never be able to live the rest of my life knowing that we could have been happy together.”

“What are you saying?”

“I want to try,” Jeonghan said, reaching out for Seungcheol’s free hand. “I love you, Seungcheol, and I want to try again with you.”

“What about that depressing future that you were convinced we would have?”

“Okay, so maybe we’ll break up eventually,” he acknowledged, “but at least then we’ll know, won’t we? Both of us. We’ll know that we did our best, and in the end, it wasn’t meant to be.”

“And your career?”

Jeonghan paused. “I’m going to tell you what Jisoo told me,” he said, lacing their fingers together. “I’ll lose some of my work, but not all of it. A lot of people are going to support us, and a lot of people are going to think we’re cursed to burn in hell. But the supportive people are going to be more than the people who think we’re cursed, and I think we have a real shot at happiness. It’s about time I cared more about myself than I did about what people thought of me.”

“Who are you and what have you done with Yoon Jeonghan?”

“I am Jeonghan. Just with different priorities.”

Seungcheol leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Whoever’s running my simulation must really be feeling benevolent today.”

“Thank Jisoo.”

“Believe me, I will. She’s going to have eternal bragging rights for this, and she knows it.”

“A sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

At the word ‘sacrifice’, Seungcheol seemed to dim again. “Are you sure you’re willing to sacrifice all that you’ve got going for you right now just for me?”

“We don’t have to go public right away,” Jeonghan said, rearranging their fingers. “And like I said, I’m a new and improved Jeonghan. One with different priorities. I’m willing to sacrifice some money.”

“Your career isn’t just money, though,” Seungcheol protested. “It brings you fulfillment and fame. I’ve seen you read scripts that your agent sends you. You love it. How can I take that away from you?”

“The world doesn’t revolve around mainstream South Korean film,” Jeonghan shrugged. “I’ll find other work. Do other things. Act in indie movies, I don’t know. But I want to do this with you, Seungcheol. Please. Give us a chance at doing this thing right.”

“So no more no-homo-ing me?”

Jeonghan laughed a little, but the mere thought of his younger self uttering those words was embarrassing. “Promise.”

“And none of this ‘just friends’ rhetoric.”

“Never.”

“And you definitely won’t manipulatively fuck me for your own benefit.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“Well then,” Seungcheol said, standing up and moving towards what Jeonghan knew to be his alcohol cabinet, “Yoon Jeonghan, I think this calls for a little champagne.”

He laughed, but as Seungcheol poured the bubbly, fizzing white wine into their glasses (just normal cups, the kind you drank soda from; the blasphemy!), Jeonghan couldn’t help but feel like the fizzing bubbles of his champagne were bubbling and popping inside his heart as well.

“To honesty and trying again,” Seungcheol offered, tilting his glass towards Jeonghan.

“To honesty and trying again,” Jeonghan echoed. “And us. To Jeongcheol.”

Seungcheol inhaled sharply in a way that suggested disapproval but clinked his glass against Jeonghan’s with a smile anyway. “I think I’m going to have to veto that ship name, Jeonghan.”

“You can veto however many you want,” Jeonghan said before sipping from his glass. “As long as I get to stay here with you.”

When Seungcheol kissed him, it tasted like sparkling wine and happiness.

* * *

“So you two are longtime collaborators,” the host said, his voice suddenly taking on that gregarious yet professional quality that came with broadcasting professionals, “Jeonghan-ssi, you used to work with Seungcheol-ssi in your modelling days, yes?”

Jeonghan smiled. “Yes, we did a few projects together.”

“Is that how you two met?”

“Funny story, actually,” Jeonghan said, turning to make eye contact with Seungcheol. “We were roommates in university. So I’ve known him since I was eighteen.”

“What a small world,” the host said, smiling at the two of them indulgently, as if this was a normal talk show promotion circuit of the kind that actors and entertainers went on all the time to promote their new projects. In that case, the host’s job was to give them leading questions so they could talk more and provide some entertaining stories for the audience to hang on to.

Today wasn’t going to be about promoting the Fashion Cares Show for AIDS Research, though.

“After you transitioned into acting, Jeonghan-ssi,” the host said, glancing down at his script, “how did you and Seungcheol-ssi reconnect and decide to work on this show together?”

“The first year we did the show,” Jeonghan said, turning his script over, “we met because of our mutual friend Hong Jisoo, who knew I’d be interested and told Seungcheol as much. Seungcheol and I became close again at that time, and after that, the show became a yearly event and so we worked together more and more.”

The host’s eyes had wavered a little when he saw Jeonghan discard the script, but such an action wasn’t entirely out of the norm for veterans of the industry like him, who knew what to say and when to say it. Normally, Jeonghan could be trusted to improvise but not step out of line.

“Seungcheol-ssi,” the host said, “you came out as gay many years ago. Would you say that there are many other professionals that you work with that are also gay?”

“This is a little gossipy, no?” Seungcheol laughed into the mic. Jeonghan had a momentary thought of thanks for the fact that they had decided to do this on a radio show instead of a TV talk show, because at least this way nothing they said could get edited out. It was live. One way or another, the truth would come out.

“I’ll say that there are many more than the public would think,” Seungcheol said, thoughtful. “Creative industries often have plenty of gay men, so nobody should be surprised that there are many of them in fashion.”

“Any hints?” the host laughed. “Have you dated any of them?”

“Uh,” Seungcheol said, his own laugh coming out more awkwardly than the host’s, “It would be rude of me to out people when even I don’t know for sure, and as for dating, well. I didn’t really date through university and after, but I had this strange are-we-dating sort of relationship with a friend of mine in that time period.”

Jeonghan had been drinking from his water and nearly choked. It felt suddenly a lot more real once Seungcheol started talking about it.

“For the last two years, I’ve been dating that same friend. But in between dating him for the first time and dating him now, I didn’t date anyone else, so I can’t really tell you about anybody in the industry.”

“If you were together in university,” the host said, “Jeonghan-ssi, you must know this man too, right? Are you close with him?”

This was it.

“Actually,” Jeonghan said, looking over at Seungcheol. He reached for the other man’s hand and intertwined their fingers, bringing their locked hands up onto the table, where the cameras would be able to see and the fans would be able to screenshot it before anybody tried to edit it out or cut the feed, “That man is me.”

He laughed a little as the host sat there, frozen as the two of them basically hijacked his radio show with the news story of the year. “So I guess you could say we’re close. Cheollie and I have been dating since the first year the show started, and we decided that it’s time to be honest with everybody. The more we hide,” and here he smiled widely at Seungcheol, who had not expected this part of Jeonghan’s speech, “the more we make it seem like there’s something wrong with our love and our sexuality. And there isn’t.”

Jeonghan adjusted the mic a little so it would catch his voice better. “So, I’m going to take this opportunity to say something. Choi Seungcheol, I love you. I’ve loved you since I was eighteen and we shared a dorm room, and I’ll never stop.”

“Love you too.”

Jeonghan made a heart out of his hands for his boyfriend, and thought, _how lovely and different it is, to be free._

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! just a point i want to make here; none of these endings that are going to appear here are more or less valid than the others. they're all equally canonical versions of how it ends. also, the title of the fic comes from a song that has inspired much of my work, goodbye by snsd.
> 
> kudos and comments are lovely and appreciated! my tumblr is [@colourofinfinity!](http://colourofinfinity.tumblr.com/) come find me and vent about svt feels
> 
> This story is part of **[the LLF comment project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject),** whose goal is to improve communication between readers and authors. 
> 
> This author invites:
> 
>   * Short comments
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>   * Questions
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